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my new IBM PS/2 Model 80...

M

Mike Chambers

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i happened to stumble across this on craigslist:

http://stlouis.craigslist.org/sys/1695250977.html

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and i'm picking it up tonight after i close up my shop. i was wondering if anybody could give me a few details though, i've googled and i know it can take up to 16 MB of RAM. i read 72-pin fast page SIMMs, but somebody told me that they think it doesn't work with your standard 72-pin SIMMs. the kind you'd find on a lot of 486 and early socket 7 boards. i hope he's wrong because i have a lot of those 72-pin SIMMs. i'd like to be able to bump the memory up to the limit. so are they non-standard proprietary crap? i know IBM liked to do some goofy stuff in many of their PS/2s. case in point: microchannel expansion bus. ew.

also, what kind of SCSI drives will it accept? i have some 1 GB DECs that are SCSI-2, which i pulled out of my old DEC 3000 AXP workstation when the motherboard died. can i stick one of those in to replace the 80 MB in there now?

lemme know please, i'm a PS/2 noob. never owned one. i'll post some pics later on when i bring it home. :mrgreen:
 
PS/2 machines are nice (I have quite a few including 2 model 80's). The 80 has 2 proprietary memory slots onboard that take huge cards (up to 4MB each I think). Any extra RAM will be using IBM memory cards (MCA bus memory expansion) and those use special 72 pin SIMMs (you can modify parity SIMMs).

My 80's came with SCSI cards but you can find ESDI drives and controllers in there as well. There are limits on what is bootable and you have to do a proper setup to get a drive to work (not as simple as just doing an OS install). You will need to find the IBM reference disks to be able to modify the setup, and hopefully the CMOS battery (a big camera battery that costs around $12) is working.
 
The motherboard ("planar" in PS/2-speak) SIMMs are proprietary.

My friend had a Model 60 with an aftermarket MCA card that took standard 30-pin SIMMs, but I don't know if it was fast enough to run in a Model 80.
 
The model 60 is a 286 (16bit), model 80 is 386DX (32bit). I know the memory card you are talking about, Kingston isn't it?
 
Unknown_K said:
The model 60 is a 286 (16bit), model 80 is 386DX (32bit). I know the memory card you are talking about, Kingston isn't it?
Click to expand...

Probably so, because his also had a Kingston processor upgrade installed, which plugged into the 286 socket and upgraded it to a 486SLC2-50. I think he got the RAM up to 16 MB with that card installed, and he also had an Orchid video card.

With the 486 processor combined with the rest of the hardware running at 286-grade speed, and the original 40 MB full-height IBM hard drive, the overall result was about equivalent to a 386SX-25: fine for DOS, and marginally acceptable in Windows 3.1.

A Model 80 can be upgraded with one of those Cyrix 486DRx² chips, but those were rare even when new, and are perfect fodder for highly inflated eBay prices today.

220px-KL_Cyrix_486DRx2.jpg
 
thanks for the info, guys. i've got the machine here. it turns on fine, however i get error 165 - "PS/2 adapter ID mismatch"

wtf does that mean? does it not like the keyboard/mouse i'm using, or what? i'm using it through a KVM i wonder if that could confuse the machine somehow... i'll try it without KVM, i'll let you all know if that fixes it. otherwise, HALP!! (edit: didn't help)

halp.jpg
 
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ah Lineman Duke from here (duked on my IRC server) is a PS/2 guru. he's helping me out. i was able to just press F1 and it booted into DOS. anyway, he's sorting me out with the reference disk and all that. damn these things are goofy.
 
OH WOW just had a nerdgasm. it's not 4 MB of RAM. there is another 12 MB on an expansion card but it wasn't in a proper full-width MCA slot. i moved it and voila - maxed out 16 MB model 80!!!! :)

also the hard drive isn't 80 MB. it's 160 MB but split into two partitions. the guy who seld me this had no clue how to use it lol. this thing is seriously pristine. i'm going to stick a second 1 GB drive in there for linux. i'll keep the other drive with DOS as is, and just use loadlin.exe when i want to.
 
I wouldnt pay that much for a model 80, but then again, I havent been able to add to my PS2 collection in years.
You should look for an XGA2 video card and a ethernet NIC for them. They are not too hard to find.

Important tip!
once you make the reference disk, DO NOT let a windows computer read it after it's created! If you do, it becomes nonbootable in the PS/2.
 
65535 said:
I wouldnt pay that much for a model 80, but then again, I havent been able to add to my PS2 collection in years.
You should look for an XGA2 video card and a ethernet NIC for them. They are not too hard to find.

Important tip!
once you make the reference disk, DO NOT let a windows computer read it after it's created! If you do, it becomes nonbootable in the PS/2.
Click to expand...

i think $50 is a fair price. especially when it's maxed to 16 MB of RAM. have a look around ebay, some of them get rather pricey. plus i didnt have to pay any sort of shipping charges, i just picked it up locally. it came with an 8514/A video card as well, and that even had the extra 1 MB vram add-on daughterboard attached. i found an MCA intel etherexpress ethernet card on ebay that i ordered last week. with shipping it was a hair under $15, and it has a refund on DOA guarantee.

i've been doing okay on the money lately, and it's been a while since i splurged on some fun vintage stuff. and yeah i heard that you cant put the ref disks in a windows machine. i do all the manipulation of it on the PS/2, or in windows but through QEMU running DOS with direct access to the floppy hardware so windows won't interfere.
 
Mike Chambers said:
i gave him $50 for it. helluva deal i think.
Click to expand...

An 8580 in pristine condition? I think it's one hell of a deal! Plus not having to pay shipping and see the actual computer before you buy it.

It's been mentioned in other threads here, but if the price goes too low there is no incentive for the seller. It will wind up at a recycler or in a dumpster.
 
Unknown_K said:
A PS/2 tower would be a very expensive pain to ship.
Click to expand...

No kidding. I remember lugging around PS/2 Model 80s at my first real computer job. I'm sure they've gotten heavier in my memory as time has gone by, but I remember some of them weighing more than 50 pounds.

I got into a situation in 1997 or so where it looked like I might have had to ship one. Long story, but the short version was the IT staff decommissioned a Model 80 that had been a server, but neglected to go back and pick it up. So someone turned it back on and continued to use it. Months (maybe even a couple of years) later, my phone rang. They couldn't access "the K drive." I didn't have that drive on my cheatsheet of what servers hosted what shares. I asked around, and my coworkers said, "We decommissioned that ages ago." The drive had crashed, but a user with a lot of political clout had data on it, so we were ordered to ship the thing to Ontrack. Yes, they could handle an EDSI drive. Yes, they could handle OS/2 and HPFS386 even. But Microchannel? They said they needed us to send the controller, and might need us to send them a machine. Fortunately they were able to track down a Microchannel machine to put the controller in, so we didn't have to ship a Model 80 monstrosity halfway across the country.

I think we ended up paying upwards of $1,000 to recover 300 megs of data. Ouch. But to their credit, they got every bit of it.
 
Mike Chambers said:
ah Lineman Duke from here (duked on my IRC server) is a PS/2 guru. he's helping me out. i was able to just press F1 and it booted into DOS. anyway, he's sorting me out with the reference disk and all that. damn these things are goofy.
Click to expand...

They're "goofy" when you compare them to how a typical machine behaved in that era... but while I agree that IBM really screwed up in their marketing, MCA actually is some pretty neat stuff that was way ahead of its time.
 
southbird said:
They're "goofy" when you compare them to how a typical machine behaved in that era... but while I agree that IBM really screwed up in their marketing, MCA actually is some pretty neat stuff that was way ahead of its time.
Click to expand...

yeah, i've done a lot of reading on the MCA bus since i've gotten the machine. considering that tower i got was built in 1990, that MCA bus is very impressive technically. similar to 32-bit PCI in performance. too bad there aren't any 100 mbit MCA ethernet cards to take advantage of it. bah!
 
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