NeXT
Veteran Member
This has been a Work in Progress for almost a decade. For anyone that hasn't followed along over the years I have never really had Much luck with these machines. Repeatedly I would find one yet it always seemed at the last moment something would come up and it would fall out of reach. Falling off a bench, left in the rain, left at the old house while moving across a country.....even one guy who felt I was nickle-and-diming him because I was so ecstatic and gave him the few extra bucks in my paypal that he turned right around and sent it off for recycling....Douche.
So finally this machine in particular shows up on ebay. Was mentioned right here in the forums. Finally decided the bloody hell with it because every other machine that sold recently fetched some dumb sum and bid $400 and finished the night with a mickey of rum. As luck would have it the listing closed at only $120 and finally it was in the mail and on the road after another $80 in shipping. Finally it was happening.
Fast forward a month and the package finally arrives from Jacksonville.
To those out there who want to ship a computer in the future THIS IS NOT HOW YOU SHIP A COMPUTER. Sure, the sheet metal sides were protected with bits of foam but the plastic clad front and back were protected much like the rest of the case and that is with bunched up balls of antistatic bags. Needless to say the front and back ended up pretty well brutalized.
As for repairing them, I'll leave them as-is until Paypal gets back me on my claims but being I'm not too iffy about things being perfect I might be able to put them back together with epoxy and acetone. Failing that, bear said he might have spares to offer (thanks for the heads up).
AAAAANYWAYS, I got nothing but good reasons to play with this machine....and I got LOTS of goodies to install. The three big things about the model 95 is it used a full-fledged 486 or even a Pentium, supported LOTS of ram and had EIGHT 32-bit MCA slots for you to fill with whatever you wanted.
From the factory my 8595 shipped with the Type 2 processor complex. It has a 25mhz 486 and in the upgrade socket bearing IBM branding is an Overdrive DX2-5o CPU. This is all the board has to offer. Years back however I was able to get the much more powerful (and bigger) Type 3 complex. It comes with a 50mhx CPU by default BUT also gives you an extra 256kb of L2 cache. The CPU is socketed. The theory is that after some more experimenting and testing we will attempt to fit a MUCH baster chip on like the pictures Kingston Am5x86 TurboChip.
The major downside however is in the transition you lose support for 72 pin parity DRAM and gain the requirement that your ram be 72 pin (40 bit?) ECC DRAM. Heavens knows where you find that.
I'm keeping the old SCSI controller. I have an Adaptec card with a much more useable HD50 connector on the back but I'm after speed. There's a method of modifying regular 1mb SIMMS so you can give this controller 2mb of cache which has been show to REALLY speed up performance on small files.
Amazingly I have a sound card. Originally it was in my RS/6000 however I really cannot think of any practical uses for such a card under AIX so we'll use it in this machine instead. I think there's nothing special about the card considering it came out of an RS/6000.
I also have for some reason a Microchannel interface for GPIB. I can't off the top of my head thing of a valid use right now but meh, lets make use of those slots!
Networking will be provided by a NEW Etherstream adapter. Even has the reference diskette in the box.
I bought this on a whim three years ago. It's an extra serial and parallel port for an MCA machine. I always joked as to why you would ever need one but I'll need it here so I can run a modem and a digitizer.
Finally, the best cards. At the top we have out conventional XGA-II card for flicker-free video at high resolutions and 2D acceleration. The two cards at the bottom however is this machine's 3D muscle. This is the microchannel version of Silicon Graphic's IrisVision. Like the much later Voodoo 2 there is a passthrough cable from the XGA card to the IrisVision, then an RGB cable leaves that and runs to your (sync on green compatible) monitor. I have all the developer documentation, the cables and ALL of the software, reference diskettes and GL demos. The only thing I DO NOT have is the OS/2 driver which means that I'll be stuck to MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 exclusively for the card unfortunately. I can't find the driver ANYWHERE!
The 1.44mb floppy drive will be upgraded to 2.88mb as I have a spare handy.
I don't have the extra rails or appropriate bezel to internally mount a CD-ROM in the machine unfortunately. Same for Magneto Optical. However I do still have an external IBM caddy loading drive. I'll have to source one of those annoying Microcen60 SCSI cables.
Finally to bring it all together we have a Calcomp serial tablet and AutoCAD 12 with the 3D AME. The IrisVision includes a driver for AutoCad so this machine can function a a full-fledged CAD machine with lots of ram, a fast CPU, a fast disk, a large digitizer and an EXTREMELY powerful video card.
As for an OS combination, I'm on the fence. I'm not completely knowledgeable on how well OS/2 2.1 or Warp 3 Supported Win32 applications like my AutoCAD or some other applications which will at times heavily rely on the drivers for the IrisVision. I really wish I could find that driver....
On the other hand I can install something like PC-DOS 6.3 and run Windows 3.1 right on top of that. It's not the IBM experience but oh well....
Additionally, while I'm suspicious it would be to add another floppy drive. I have one of IBM's external 5.25" drives and while it does have an MCA adapter, I'm out of slots. I'm suspicious how hard it would be to snake a ribbon cable extension from the floppy harness to a loose hanging connector on the back. Would that even be detected and work??
So finally this machine in particular shows up on ebay. Was mentioned right here in the forums. Finally decided the bloody hell with it because every other machine that sold recently fetched some dumb sum and bid $400 and finished the night with a mickey of rum. As luck would have it the listing closed at only $120 and finally it was in the mail and on the road after another $80 in shipping. Finally it was happening.
Fast forward a month and the package finally arrives from Jacksonville.
To those out there who want to ship a computer in the future THIS IS NOT HOW YOU SHIP A COMPUTER. Sure, the sheet metal sides were protected with bits of foam but the plastic clad front and back were protected much like the rest of the case and that is with bunched up balls of antistatic bags. Needless to say the front and back ended up pretty well brutalized.
As for repairing them, I'll leave them as-is until Paypal gets back me on my claims but being I'm not too iffy about things being perfect I might be able to put them back together with epoxy and acetone. Failing that, bear said he might have spares to offer (thanks for the heads up).
AAAAANYWAYS, I got nothing but good reasons to play with this machine....and I got LOTS of goodies to install. The three big things about the model 95 is it used a full-fledged 486 or even a Pentium, supported LOTS of ram and had EIGHT 32-bit MCA slots for you to fill with whatever you wanted.
From the factory my 8595 shipped with the Type 2 processor complex. It has a 25mhz 486 and in the upgrade socket bearing IBM branding is an Overdrive DX2-5o CPU. This is all the board has to offer. Years back however I was able to get the much more powerful (and bigger) Type 3 complex. It comes with a 50mhx CPU by default BUT also gives you an extra 256kb of L2 cache. The CPU is socketed. The theory is that after some more experimenting and testing we will attempt to fit a MUCH baster chip on like the pictures Kingston Am5x86 TurboChip.
The major downside however is in the transition you lose support for 72 pin parity DRAM and gain the requirement that your ram be 72 pin (40 bit?) ECC DRAM. Heavens knows where you find that.
I'm keeping the old SCSI controller. I have an Adaptec card with a much more useable HD50 connector on the back but I'm after speed. There's a method of modifying regular 1mb SIMMS so you can give this controller 2mb of cache which has been show to REALLY speed up performance on small files.
Amazingly I have a sound card. Originally it was in my RS/6000 however I really cannot think of any practical uses for such a card under AIX so we'll use it in this machine instead. I think there's nothing special about the card considering it came out of an RS/6000.
I also have for some reason a Microchannel interface for GPIB. I can't off the top of my head thing of a valid use right now but meh, lets make use of those slots!
Networking will be provided by a NEW Etherstream adapter. Even has the reference diskette in the box.
I bought this on a whim three years ago. It's an extra serial and parallel port for an MCA machine. I always joked as to why you would ever need one but I'll need it here so I can run a modem and a digitizer.
Finally, the best cards. At the top we have out conventional XGA-II card for flicker-free video at high resolutions and 2D acceleration. The two cards at the bottom however is this machine's 3D muscle. This is the microchannel version of Silicon Graphic's IrisVision. Like the much later Voodoo 2 there is a passthrough cable from the XGA card to the IrisVision, then an RGB cable leaves that and runs to your (sync on green compatible) monitor. I have all the developer documentation, the cables and ALL of the software, reference diskettes and GL demos. The only thing I DO NOT have is the OS/2 driver which means that I'll be stuck to MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 exclusively for the card unfortunately. I can't find the driver ANYWHERE!
The 1.44mb floppy drive will be upgraded to 2.88mb as I have a spare handy.
I don't have the extra rails or appropriate bezel to internally mount a CD-ROM in the machine unfortunately. Same for Magneto Optical. However I do still have an external IBM caddy loading drive. I'll have to source one of those annoying Microcen60 SCSI cables.
Finally to bring it all together we have a Calcomp serial tablet and AutoCAD 12 with the 3D AME. The IrisVision includes a driver for AutoCad so this machine can function a a full-fledged CAD machine with lots of ram, a fast CPU, a fast disk, a large digitizer and an EXTREMELY powerful video card.
As for an OS combination, I'm on the fence. I'm not completely knowledgeable on how well OS/2 2.1 or Warp 3 Supported Win32 applications like my AutoCAD or some other applications which will at times heavily rely on the drivers for the IrisVision. I really wish I could find that driver....
On the other hand I can install something like PC-DOS 6.3 and run Windows 3.1 right on top of that. It's not the IBM experience but oh well....
Additionally, while I'm suspicious it would be to add another floppy drive. I have one of IBM's external 5.25" drives and while it does have an MCA adapter, I'm out of slots. I'm suspicious how hard it would be to snake a ribbon cable extension from the floppy harness to a loose hanging connector on the back. Would that even be detected and work??
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