Ole Juul
Veteran Member
Someone brought me a very nice present today. (Thanks Fred!) An IBM luggable with all the peripherals and disks. The owner used to work for IBM and had it since new. Lucky me! Here is what I got with it:
IBM 4863 monitor
IBM proprinter Type 4201 001
IBM external modem 7855-10
Blue denim IBM carrying bag (I'll be the coolest dude at Starbucks. W00t!)
IBM Analog Input Card (uninstalled)
It booted up right away and I could see it has an ST 238 R with ST11 bios revision 2.0.0 1988, but it seems a little flaky since it lost it after a bit. Tilting the machine allowed it to boot again. I guess I'll have to do a low level format. It's been sitting for quite a few years.
The rest of the specs are 640K RAM, serial port (8250 UART), printer port, and of course the IBM floppy card with the external connector. I haven't opened it up yet, so that's all I know about the cards. The Bios version is IBM 11/08/82.
What shocked me, because I never thought anybody would actually use it, was it had MS-DOS v4.01 installed! It also had a dosshell menu - something which I've never tried before. Menu items are: Lotus v2.2; Quick DOS; IBM Assistant Series v2; Print Magic; WP 5.1; QAPlus Diagnostic; HomeTax Plus; and Quicken Version 5.0. So I guess the machine was still used in 1991 since that's the date for Quicken v5.
The amber built-in monitor looks perfect, but I plugged in the 4863 just to see. Wow! They both work at once. I have never been fond of CGA but I guess it's been so long that it looks pretty cool to me now. It's certainly an interesting monitor. The 4863 is made specifically for the PCjR and I see someone has made an adaptor to make it work with the IBM CGA adapter. Do those monitors actually accept EGA? - that's what I read somewhere. If anybody has more info on these monitors I'd be interested.Anyway, it looks great in all it's garish CGA glory.
Another great thing about this haul was the software that came with it. Along with the usual copies of games and odd stuff, there were original disks for HomeTaxPlus, Quicken, DBase III Plus, and five IBM 3270 Personal Computer disks which I don't quite know what are yet. "Exploring the IBM Portable Personal Computer" (1984) should be fun, but the real gems were original disks for PC-DOS v3.10 (1985) and PC-DOS v2.10 (1983). I'm really glad for those. BTW, for anybody reading this who is not familiar with old 5 1/4' floppies - they always work.
For now, I'll just play a bit with it, but since the HDD probably should have a LLF anyway, I might install the original DOS 2.1 or (since I have it now), 3.1. I like to fix a vintage computer at a specific year. However, in this case the state of the computer is actually pretty genuine. We'll see.
IBM 4863 monitor
IBM proprinter Type 4201 001
IBM external modem 7855-10
Blue denim IBM carrying bag (I'll be the coolest dude at Starbucks. W00t!)
IBM Analog Input Card (uninstalled)
It booted up right away and I could see it has an ST 238 R with ST11 bios revision 2.0.0 1988, but it seems a little flaky since it lost it after a bit. Tilting the machine allowed it to boot again. I guess I'll have to do a low level format. It's been sitting for quite a few years.
The rest of the specs are 640K RAM, serial port (8250 UART), printer port, and of course the IBM floppy card with the external connector. I haven't opened it up yet, so that's all I know about the cards. The Bios version is IBM 11/08/82.
What shocked me, because I never thought anybody would actually use it, was it had MS-DOS v4.01 installed! It also had a dosshell menu - something which I've never tried before. Menu items are: Lotus v2.2; Quick DOS; IBM Assistant Series v2; Print Magic; WP 5.1; QAPlus Diagnostic; HomeTax Plus; and Quicken Version 5.0. So I guess the machine was still used in 1991 since that's the date for Quicken v5.
The amber built-in monitor looks perfect, but I plugged in the 4863 just to see. Wow! They both work at once. I have never been fond of CGA but I guess it's been so long that it looks pretty cool to me now. It's certainly an interesting monitor. The 4863 is made specifically for the PCjR and I see someone has made an adaptor to make it work with the IBM CGA adapter. Do those monitors actually accept EGA? - that's what I read somewhere. If anybody has more info on these monitors I'd be interested.Anyway, it looks great in all it's garish CGA glory.
Another great thing about this haul was the software that came with it. Along with the usual copies of games and odd stuff, there were original disks for HomeTaxPlus, Quicken, DBase III Plus, and five IBM 3270 Personal Computer disks which I don't quite know what are yet. "Exploring the IBM Portable Personal Computer" (1984) should be fun, but the real gems were original disks for PC-DOS v3.10 (1985) and PC-DOS v2.10 (1983). I'm really glad for those. BTW, for anybody reading this who is not familiar with old 5 1/4' floppies - they always work.
For now, I'll just play a bit with it, but since the HDD probably should have a LLF anyway, I might install the original DOS 2.1 or (since I have it now), 3.1. I like to fix a vintage computer at a specific year. However, in this case the state of the computer is actually pretty genuine. We'll see.