Frankin PS/1

[caluser2000]

As members know I picked up the Redstone XT off Tomo in Hastings yesterday. To help him have a clean out I accepted a few other goodies (it would rude not to) , a parts only Packard Bell, an Archie 200mmx machine and IBM PS/1 were included. The PB had an SB 16, fdd and cdrom so they're out now along with the mobo/riser awaiting some project or tother.

I had a look at the PS/1 and it has a broken flip down cover-no biggy-and all the useful bits n bobs stripped out apart from the CPU . A 16 meg simm stuck in it, along with my 40 meg tesing hdd and fdd. I drilled a hole in the VGA output so it'd accept the cable from my P96 crt- tried a trident in one of the isa slots but nothing on the screen so drilling a hole made sence and now it's ready for any modern SVGA screen cable. Turned it on beeb-beeb cmos battery low error, date error prompted for to enter the bios settings, press esc and booted to Direct Access-Goodie!!.

Just been spending a few hours fabricating a cental riser holder/centre strut and fdd/hdd cage out of the left over PB bits. It's coming out quite well, just a mod to the strut tomorrow with some holes for secure it along with the cage- all good. Quite enjoyed getting out the angle grinder, dremel, file and rubber mallet. Any one know the thread format for the component securing screws in these PCs at all?

Oh and Archie(case is a bit dented) boots up sweet as a nut. It's got windows 98 on it but I might slap my OS/2 v4 hdd in it.

[caluser2000]

Posted pics of progress over at VCF http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum ... ankin-PS-1
Not too shaby if I say so myself.

[caluser2000]

Got the fdd cage etc. storted. Now to sort out a hdd and cd/cdr reader. I'm contemplating putting Dr-Dos/Novell Dos 7.x and Desqview/X if the former works ok with the built-in Cirrus Logic video. Nice having 64 megs of ram to play with, so OS/2 or NT 3.x/4 aren't out of the equation. One thing I like about the layout is ram, CPU and cache are easy to deal with. Not so fussed with the flip down cover though. It is flimsy. I might look onto some pvc "L" section to block the gap left with the cover removed.

[caluser2000]

As mentioned of VCF I've been having a play with this beasty. Fitted a 2.1 gig drive and the bios picked it up as a 2.1 gig drive. The bios listed it as a 12meg drive and surprisingly it booted into Windows 95 no problem. Tried a few slightly larger drives from the same era but no dice. Even setting the jumpers to around 2gig had no effect. Tested a couple of conner 400ish meg drives I got spare for the Acorns and autodetection worked fine. There appears to be no way of manually setting drive parameters like all the other 486 class machines have.

Just tested out the MS Dos 6.22/WFW 3.11disks I received a few weeks ago and they're fine despite the labels looking like they've been in a moist storage.

Wide eyed and bushy tailed far too early in the morning.......Laptops make good lap warmers. The Dell Inspiron 6000 I was given is running real well and is getting more and more use. Who knows it may replace my main rig. A few years ago I would've scoffed at the idea.

[caluser2000]

A bit more totoing. Installed networking including tcpip32b and a Genius Lan nic. Connected up a piece thin net cable between it and the Compaq, ran ftpsrv and the wfws ftp client. Connected up fine.

[tezza]

Cool.

It always struck me as strange that IBM would come out with the PS/1 AFTER the PS/2.?

[SpidersWeb]

What drivers did you use for the Genius LAN card?
I have a couple but avoid using them because I had no way to configure/use them.

Thinnet is quite neat, I have cable and one T but no terminators! Oddly hard to find that stuff.

It always struck me as strange that IBM would come out with the PS/1 AFTER the PS/2.?

Yeah I found it odd as well, I think it was to give it a more friendly home orientated name - PS/2 for business, PS/1 for home. It became "Aptiva" in the Pentium gen. I remember when those were at Noel Leeming - 30% more expensive than machines that were faster and more expandable. My parents got one just for the "IBM" badge, but it's no surprise they eventually lost favor in the home market.

[caluser2000]

I think PS/2 was more tied up with OS/2 and MCA though even some of those sytems, the 286s anyway, where ISA based. As we all know the MCA arch. was not taken up by the masses. I guess calling these systems PS/1 gave some association to IBM. It's interesting that the the PS/1 range is still quite large from an all-in-one 286 right up to high end 486s.

The one I've got is very snappy for disc access etc. not disappointed at all. Only thing it could have is more vram for a bit higher screen resolution/size.

Jonno if you like I can send you the setup disk image or even mail a disk if you like. I've got plenty spare. RS stock the terminators an I would be surprise if you couldn't get them through Jaycar- http://www.jaycar.co.nz/productView.asp?ID=PP0655