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i have acquired the IBM PS/1
it has a first generation Sound Blaster 16 in it
floppy drives look to be the original equipment
no hard drive, i think i have a period appropriate replacement that may even work
it looks like a scrapper rather violently removed all the cables except power, dislodging the expansion riser in the process
so i have to replace all those, dunno if i still have a stash of them somewhere
has a 12-10-92 date stamp on the case cover, chips on the board have date stamps as late as 40th week 1992, so looks like this thing was built in Oct 1992
perhaps this was someones Christmas '92 present 
CDROM has a manufacture date of Jan 1993, so it was upgraded quickly or perhaps it sold later as a post-christmas clearance deal 
this probably came with Windows 3.1, and would have been a fairly high end machine at the time
IBM says these all came with 2400bps internal modems, and had Prodigy pre-installed
it appears it was upgraded to 28.8kbps around 1994
and it has a whole load of Micron RAM in it, manufactured in 1996
this is 32mb! that's the max the board supports and a hell of a lot of RAM to have in a 486
i had 16mb in mine back in the day and that was plenty to run anything you'd want to run on a 486
an early Windows 95 will run great on this old beast
has a Tseng Labs ET4000AX maxed out to 1mb on the board
i was hoping for VLB but the AX is a 16bit bus, however it is still one of the best SVGA chips of the day
and has 128k of direct mapped L2 cache, which is enough to support that 32mb RAM 
it lives!
kinda surprised they crammed 32mb in it but they didn't upgrade the CPU?
would love to get an IBM 5x86 100mhz in it like my first 486 had
wonder if the person i left it with still has it...
sadly nothing more i can do with it until i find some ribbon cables
and it needs an ethernet card
well annoying problem, raided my circa 2006 Athlon 64 for cables and they're all hard keyed
the PS/1 extremely isn't
i don't want to cut pins off retro hardware 
a pile of parts have appeared!
if i'm reading the pinout right, the Panasonic CDROM uses the IDE key pin for something important so an un-keyed cable is required
first order of business, a cleaning disk of similar vintage
does the floppy work?
... no, it's flakey 
welp swapping it out for now with a floppy drive i pulled out of a circa 2005 dell i found on the sidewalk in front of the San Jose library after they upgraded a few years back
it gets 20.8fps in 3D Bench
memtest86+ sure takes a long time but it passes, yay!
okay now we need a hard drive
can't find the ~300mb drive i was thinking of, i dumped most every hard drive i had under 40gb at Free Geek Twin Cities when i moved
could be absurd and put a 120gb drive in it
but i found this one in my stash, a WD Caviar 1.6gb drive from April 1996 that refuses to work on my USB-IDE adaptor, however works perfectly on the PS/1, and pairs nicely with the 32mb RAM crammed in it
has a fresh install of Win98 which would theoretically even boot on this machine, but we run in to our first Annoying Vintage Problem, the BIOS predates LBA by a few years and can't see more than 528mb
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing
the way around this in DOS is to install a Drive Overlay like EZ-Drive, which does a bunch of hackery to boot itself first and replaces the entire IDE portion of the BIOS with updated drivers
ta-da, we can boot DOS and use the entire hard drive! 
well we can load an OS now
one reason i picked this up is a similar 386 PS/1 with Win 3.1 and that wild door over the floppy drives on display at Target, is the first time i ever used Windows
never seen one since until now
and as it turns out, the original recovery disks for this system have been preserved!
https://ps1stuff.wordpress.com/download/downloads-for-type-2133/
TWELVE FLOPPY DISKS LATER we have a factory stock IBM PS/1!
the BIOS/EZ-BIOS boot is excruciatingly slow for some reason but once DOS starts this thing flies!
Windows 3.1 starts in seconds!
a healthy 1mb smartdrv cache probably helps
so what do you get as value-adds on a Fall 1992 IBM PS/1?
lots of backup/restore options, a virus scanner, Microsoft Works 2.0, and some online services
IBM, co-owner of Prodigy, seems to have been ahead of the curve, pushing online services as early as 1990
we're a year out from September 1993 here folks
notably Promenade was a little known service from Quantum Computer Services made specifically for the IBM PS/1 
instant messaging!
https://www.technologizer.com/2010/05/24/aol-anniversary/
... it appears Promenade was absorbed into AOL not long after this
uwu what is this?
you could get an IBM PS/1 pre-installed with OS/2 2.0, on a machine that appears to be identical to this P71 model, with twice the RAM and a bigger HD?
oh we're so installing this
TWENTY-ONE FLOPPY DISKS LATER...
attn @ncommander i found the holy grail, a retail PC that shipped with OS/2 pre-installed
(yes i watched all the OS/2 streams)
has Microsoft Works and Prodigy, same as the Windows pre-load, but Promenade is absent?
did GeoWorks not run on OS/2?
where did these sell???
well gave OS/2 a chance, installing the soundblaster CDROM drivers is a 100% manual process, and needs OS/2 2.1 to actually work anyway
the text editor is weird, the file manager is awful, managing windows is painful, i figured the pre-load would have ET4000 drivers but no it just seems to be stuck with plain 16 color VGA...
don't think i'm going to stick with OS/2 on this machine
let me know if there's anything you really want to see
how about a nice game of chess
okay, think i've had enough reminders of how fiddly this era was, decided on putting Windows 95 OSR2 on this thing, which will give us FAT32, networking, and all drivers for this system out of the box
bad news, the cdrom is detected but doesn't see any disks, and to top it off the one CD burner i saved doesn't seem to work anymore
that leaves the network card for mass movement of data onto this machine
so by installing Basic Linux, an old two floppy Linux based on Slackware 4.0, i was able to feed the Win95 install files over the network
https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/
ezhttpd for the win once again
https://github.com/SegHaxx/ezhttpd
old PC tech trick, just copy the Win95 directory from the CD onto a blank C: drive, and start the install from there
you will never have to suffer the dreaded "please insert the Win95 install CD" dialogs when fiddling with drivers
@Seg I think that's the issue you need the K6 patch to fix. CPU too fast = Windows Protection Error.
@philpem this is a 486DX33!
kinda suspecting something with the EZ-Drive overlay even though this is the version that is specifically supposed to support Win95 OSR2 FAT32
whatever was mostly looking to boot to DOS mode to play games
@Seg@oldbytes.space @philpem@digipres.club Back In My Day i used to mainline a 486 and honestly if you have the memory (and you do), it's best to go right to 98se, it's more or less stable but still quite usable on that class of machine. 95 is an exercise in frustration and always has been and it makes me sad tbh
, Dream Witch 
@Seg Whaaaaa... Okay that's weird. My Libretto is apparently running EZ-BIOS 9.06W from Micro House International, I don't know if that helps you any? But I do have 32bit disk I/O enabled, albeit in Win98SE.
Edit: I vaguely remember this being an issue with old versions of EZDrive (I think my old P100 had this problem in the 90s) but all I can really say is 9.06W works.
@philpem @Seg Yeah, it smells like the same error - a timing loop calibration failing In the disk drivers - but on a machine this old I'm a bit baffled!
(https://www.os2museum.com/wp/those-win9x-crashes-on-fast-machines/ has the gory details if you haven't seen it already)