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Small Haul (more to come?)

T

TandyMan100

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Joined
Jan 7, 2009
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At my computer
Went up to my favorite pc repair hangout (moms boyfriend is manager), and was poking around at the old stuff that's dropped off by various places, and usually given to me, when I spotted something.

On closer inspection, it was an IBM PS/2 Model 30. Insanely happy, much to the amusement of the manager I grabbed it up and a bunch of other random and most likely non-vintage stuff, and headed home.

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All of the stuff in the car
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Ye olde stack of old computers.
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Closeup of the PS/2
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More of the same. The badge.
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And here's the back of the PS/2.


I haven't booted up any of these, but I'll be posting back on the condition of the PS/2 and the monitor.

I was told a church dropped these off, and they have more stuff a-coming, so I might just end up with more vintage equipment, but we shall see.
 
Good haul. I must say I do like the small and light (for their time) pizza-box design of the PS/2 Model 30s.
 
tezza said:
Good haul. I must say I do like the small and light (for their time) pizza-box design of the PS/2 Model 30s.
Click to expand...

I have a special affection for this form-factor, besides the pure practicality of it. The first computer I ever used was my dad's Gateway 486DX-2 back in 2003 after he replaced it with an Athlon XP (yes, we used a 486 as our main computer until 2003). I then took it over, marveling at the fact I could type, type WORDS, people, and they would appear on this screen, and I could save and load them. And I could also take this mouse thing, wiggle it around in paint, and (get this), LINES would appear. That was magical.

This joyous time lasted until I was 9 or so and discovered the joy of SCREWDRIVERS. Unfortunately, I didn't yet understand cables could be unplugged, and simply unscrewed everything in sight and completely trashed the machine. We got rid of it shortly after. I've always wanted it back...
 
Well, I pulled apart the PS/2 to take a look inside, and found a remarkably clean computer. Hardly any dust to be found. After laughing at the power switch for a while, I removed the modem and put in an Intel Etherexpress 16. However, I noticed this enormous full-length expansion card in the top ISA slot. It had a big plastic cover towards the front which read "Hardcard II 80". Interesting. I'll google that later. I got the etherexpress put in, took some pictures (you'll be able to find a full write-up on retro-box.net when I get my server turned back on), and wrapped it all up. Upon researching the hardcard, it turns out the Hardcard II 80 was an 80mb ISA hard drive expansion for the PS/2 and compatibles. Interesting. I booted up and typed in "D:" the results of which were seen immediately. I then did a DIR, and was greeted with what looked like a standard win3.1 installation with Word and some fonts. I cd'd to the windows directory and ran win, and saw that I was correct. I have no clue how the previous user used this thing with Win3.1, as it was unusably slow for me. Finding nothing of interest on the 80mb hard drive, I formatted it. Pretty interesting stuff. I've got PC-DOS 7 running, and now I just need to replace the RTC chip (those are socketed, right? I can just pull them out?).
 
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