oh thats nice and clean!

"Im a bit afraid after all that messages."

MEH. Dont be. All retro computers have quirks. IBM's quirks are (usually) well documented and intentional. I don't suggest PS/2 for first time retro, only because the clones are usually much more common and thus cheaper. They have more gaming options, which is pretty much the primary use of retro machines.

its easy to build upon basic retro computer knowledge, and THEN get into the IBM swamp. SCSI can be a royal pain in the ass. But once you wrap your brain around it, it rules become very easy to predict.

it just takes a bit of extra time, money, and research for PS/2. The sound cards and IDE cards are VERY new to the IBM scene. pre pandemic they were but a dream. I remember selling a spare sound blaster card for $1200. So the "new" cards are a welcome life saver!

luckybob wrote on 2023-09-08, 17:47:

oh thats nice and clean! […]
Show full quote

oh thats nice and clean!

"Im a bit afraid after all that messages."

MEH. Dont be. All retro computers have quirks. IBM's quirks are (usually) well documented and intentional. I don't suggest PS/2 for first time retro, only because the clones are usually much more common and thus cheaper. They have more gaming options, which is pretty much the primary use of retro machines.

its easy to build upon basic retro computer knowledge, and THEN get into the IBM swamp. SCSI can be a royal pain in the ass. But once you wrap your brain around it, it rules become very easy to predict.

it just takes a bit of extra time, money, and research for PS/2. The sound cards and IDE cards are VERY new to the IBM scene. pre pandemic they were but a dream. I remember selling a spare sound blaster card for $1200. So the "new" cards are a welcome life saver!

Agree with all of this.

I have multiple PS/2 machines. They are a pain in the ass. But also fun. They’re more complicated to work with than other retro machines due to the limited expansion availability (except for ISA based Model 25 and 30) but some modern quality of life improvements have made them much more tolerable.

I recently added one of those MC-IDEs and Resound New Wave Sound blaster clone to one of my MCA PS/2s and they (although not particularly cheap) are game changers. I have other vintage machines that are ISA/PCI based but I enjoy fooling around with these. As annoying as they can be there were definitely some good ideas floating around in there. Tool-less design allows you to easily take them apart, MCA cards were closer to PNP than other stuff at the time, and I just love the look of them.

Plenty of downsides. MCA itself, and the proprietary floppies and HD connections being top of the list. I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to repair those PS/2 floppy drives and cursing them out for still not working. But it’s still fun. Nothing feels better than looking at/using a PS/2 that is clean and looking pretty, and fully working. At least until something breaks again.

Don’t feel bad about asking for help. I know nothing and do it frequently. It’s a cool community that works to develop new tech for them and keep them alive. I’m up to six different PS/2s now (not all in working condition. Yet…….)

polishvito wrote on 2023-09-08, 23:29:

Plenty of downsides. MCA itself, and the proprietary floppies and HD connections being top of the list.

Nice old proprietary computers but you also list most of the reasons to not mess with one. Have to wonder why IBM decided to go all out and ruin their own future by doing those proprietary changes, it was their downfall......

Horun wrote on 2023-09-09, 02:42:

Nice old proprietary computers but you also list most of the reasons to not mess with one. Have to wonder why IBM decided to go all out and ruin their own future by doing those proprietary changes, it was their downfall......

To be honest, IBMs personal computer glory days were already over even without the PS/2 and it only hastened the fall. PC market had already democratized by the time IBM introduced PS/2s and high margin days were over. IBMs early advantage with their big iron clients was eroding as PCs were becoming a commodity and it was more and more irrelevant for businesses whose PCs were humming in their offices. I really can’t see much different end result for IBMs PC business in the long run. And during the 90s and early 2000s, many other big name players were also struggling in a highly competitive market.

I think that IBM knew that if they don’t try some other approach, they are fighting a losing game in the long run and numbers already showed that as the market was eroding fast under them.

And IMO PS/2s were in many ways still influential machines. First, they brought us VGA which lingers with us to this day. I’d also say that PS/2s showed a model of highly integrated desktops where pretty much all controllers were integrated on the MB (or planar) including display adapter. They were also very first systems designed with compact 3.5” architecture in mind both with HDDs and floppy drives and I’d argue that they were computers which played big part in driving 3.5” floppy drives to PC ecosystem.

Horun wrote on 2023-09-09, 02:42:

Nice old proprietary computers but you also list most of the reasons to not mess with one. Have to wonder why IBM decided to go all out and ruin their own future by doing those proprietary changes, it was their downfall......

The short answer is; because prior to the 5150 IBM had a vise-grip on the computer industry, they wanted to keep control at any cost and thus profits high. Remember the Apple 1984 commercial? Ironically, the 5150 did that to IBM. A computer that could be cloned easily, and had every software dev making software for because of "IBM" branding. PS/2 was the death knell of a company that got stuck in it ways and refused to change how they ran. I'd wager, if IBM had gone with the flow, made MCA an open (and free) standard, the story would be vastly different.

obviously the long answer is a bit more nuanced than IBM zigged, everyone else zagged, but the end result is the same.

So if you ever think to yourself; "Why did IBM do this?" 9 times out of 10, the answer boils down to; "because fuck you, that's why." and the industry universally said; "well fuck you too buddy." to which IBM replied; "I'm not your buddy, friend." Only to hear; " I'm not your friend, guy" as IBM floated away on an ice berg.

luckybob wrote on 2023-09-09, 13:46:

The short answer is; because prior to the 5150 IBM had a vise-grip on the computer industry, they wanted to keep control at any cost and thus profits high. Remember the Apple 1984 commercial? Ironically, the 5150 did that to IBM. A computer that could be cloned easily, and had every software dev making software for because of "IBM" branding.

And perhaps more importantly, a computer whose operating system was written by a third party who was quite eager to license the same thing under a mildly-different name to anybody who came knocking at the door.

Cloning the hardware was one thing, being able to get the real software certainly made it much easier...

(It's interesting to see how this played out, four decades later - the two parties who actually controlled the key parts of the IBM PC architecture, Microsoft and Intel, are probably the only two that consistently made money from the IBM PC-compatible architecture and continue to do so. Meanwhile everybody else has come and gone, particularly in the retail segment. If you walked into a big consumer store here in 1995-6, you would have seen IBM Aptivas, Compaq Presarios, ASTs, Packard Hells, a few NECs, etc. All of those have been out of the industry for upwards of 20+ years, although I guess Compaq at least half-survived in HP whereas the others are completely gone. Other than Dell, most of the people who ate their lunch - Gateway, eMachines, Micron, etc - are gone too. The retail PC market, in particular, where you basically cannot differentiate yourself from the next guy/gal, is brutal, although it seems to have stabilized at its current HP/Acer/Asus/Dell/Lenovo/Microsoft structure for a while now...)

The same thing happens to almost every industry. Look at the innovation with cars in the early years. Now, the industry is just a couple players. Granted electric is a shake-up, but that's just a change under the hood. The vehicle equation is SOLVED. we know what it takes to make a car, how to make it safe, shape and everything is all fingered out. Same for computers. Most things have been tried and the consumer has spoken. The next big thing are robots, and its going to be the same thing. slow progress, big breakthrough, vast experimentation, consolidation, status quo.

luckybob wrote on 2023-09-09, 14:51:

The same thing happens to almost every industry. Look at the innovation with cars in the early years. Now, the industry is just a couple players. Granted electric is a shake-up, but that's just a change under the hood. The vehicle equation is SOLVED. we know what it takes to make a car, how to make it safe, shape and everything is all fingered out. Same for computers. Most things have been tried and the consumer has spoken. The next big thing are robots, and its going to be the same thing. slow progress, big breakthrough, vast experimentation, consolidation, status quo.

Right on point. Cars have been quite mature product for a long time and big innovations are quite long time in the past. When we are talking about new cars (or computers), we pretty much talk about evolutions instead of revolutions. Basic concept has been quite the same for a long time. And as you pointed out electric cars pretty much differ just from the drive line side and being successful in EV market is mostly due to being able to scale production (that is managing the transition) and building a supply chain that EVs require. And electric drive line is pretty much as old as the one based on the ICE in any case, there is nothing magical in electric motors. It is the evolution of battery technology and battery prices that has made electric vehicles a viable alternative, not some big invention that some car manufacturer needed to make.

And it indeed happens everywhere. Look at smart phones. They are practically the same product they have been for more than a decade at least. And people rarely get excited for next iterations anymore: more processing power, memory and higher resolution and faster screens. Rinse and repeat. And we have pretty much two ecosystems left and the market share is ruled by handful of manufacturers, Apple and Samsung being the largest, both having more or less fifth of the total market share. Many manufacturers are long gone or fallen to almost obscurity.

luckybob wrote on 2023-09-09, 14:51:

The same thing happens to almost every industry. Look at the innovation with cars in the early years. Now, the industry is just a couple players. Granted electric is a shake-up, but that's just a change under the hood. The vehicle equation is SOLVED. we know what it takes to make a car, how to make it safe, shape and everything is all fingered out. Same for computers. Most things have been tried and the consumer has spoken. The next big thing are robots, and its going to be the same thing. slow progress, big breakthrough, vast experimentation, consolidation, status quo.

Except in the car industry, the players are largely old and are really the survivors of the beginning of each country's auto industry. E.g.
- GM - founded in 1908, but traces its history to 1897
- Ford - founded in 1903
- Stellantis - Peugeot was playing with cars in the 1890s, Opel 1898, Fiat founded in 1899, Citroen founded in 1919, Chrysler is 1926
- Volkswagen - founded in 1937, though Audi can arguably be traced back to 1909, Bentley was founded in 1909, etc.
- Mercedes-Benz (wow, the parent company is not called Daimler anymore?) - 1883
- BMW - 1928, if you want to count Rolls-Royce under BMW, 1906
- Toyota - 1937
- Renault - 1899
Unless I am forgetting someone, Hyundai (founded 1967) is the youngest automaker active in the traditional ICE segment in North America.

And plenty of others in all countries have come and gone along the way.

In the PC business, basically everybody from the first two decades of IBM PC-compatible computers got wiped out.

luckybob wrote on 2023-09-09, 13:46:

I'd wager, if IBM had gone with the flow, made MCA an open (and free) standard, the story would be vastly different.

I personally don't think this necessarily would've changed the end result, that is IBM dropping its personal computer business at some point. If IBM would've released MCA as open standard then sure, it most likely would've gained adoption at least until PCI came along and perhaps EISA and VLB would've never happened. But that doesn't change the fact that in 1981 IBM started with 100% market share and there was no going back to that anymore. IBM could only lose after the clone manufacturers gained traction.

PCs were also an oddity, if you look at the history of IBM. IBM making products for small businesses or even consumers? Before 1980s that was pretty much unheard of. IBM PC and its successors (PS/2s, PS/1s, Aptivas etc.) were not something that IBM has been traditionally building their business on. Even the original PC was mainly meant as something extra for their big iron clients. In a sense, whole PC thing was a sort of anomaly in IBM business and when they in fact did lost the control and after a while were one of the many selling practically generic systems like everybody else, it should be no surprise that they decided to sell whole business line away.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2023-09-09, 16:37:

PCs were also an oddity, if you look at the history of IBM. IBM making products for small businesses or even consumers? Before 1980s that was pretty much unheard of. IBM PC and its successors (PS/2s, PS/1s, Aptivas etc.) were not something that IBM has been traditionally building their business on. Even the original PC was mainly meant as something extra for their big iron clients. In a sense, whole PC thing was a sort of anomaly in IBM business and when they in fact did lost the control and after a while were one of the many selling practically generic systems like everybody else, it should be no surprise that they decided to sell whole business line away.

The rather ironic thing is that, typically, each generation of computing has had different winners, e.g.
- mainframes (IBM)
- minicomputers (Digital)
- *NIX RISC workstations (Sun/SGI)
- microcomputers (Intel/Microsoft)
- smartphones (Apple/Samsung)

IBM basically invented the dominant platform of the PC era (making them probably the only player in the industry to create the dominant platform of multiple generations) - it tells you something that the 12" MacBook I am typing this on has a lot more in common architecturally with the IBM 5150 than with, well, any product called "Mac"or "Macintosh" prior to 2006 and the 2010 Mac Pro upstairs boots a Windows XP installer but won't run any software for the classic MacOS (and I suspect that with some creativity, both of them could be made to boot MS-DOS 6.22) - yet they completely lost control of the platform and ended up retreating to their previous strengths from previous generations.

And the trauma from IBM's early-90s near-death-experience also caused them to stop to want to invent new things. e.g. why didn't IBM invent, say, a PalmPilot or a BlackBerry? Certainly fits in with their traditional business focus, but they haven't really created any new platforms since, oh, the AS/400?

Got my PS/2 today. The Seller packed it very well. So anything fine so far.
So i first open it up and remove the mainboard, drives and the PSU.

It looks like i have to drill the PSU case to open it, there only rivets..

For the Floppy i opened it and only see 2x 10uf 16V caps. Looks easy so far. Any suggestion what i need a look/clean at the drive?
I add some pictures.

Mild capcitor leaks usually show as dull/discolored pads and if it has spread, then there is usually either brownish stains and or sticky brownish dust around the area with leaked electrolyte.

Your drive looks pretty good based on the photos, so it may be functional. It is definitely a different drive from mine, it had something like 8-9 caps alltogether in those two PCBs. You’ll know if it works when you test it.

Otherwise I would just do the basic cleaning with IPA and q-tips and lubricate the worm drive.

i just replaced the two caps, 5min.. Cleaned the ribbons with some deoxid, and the head with some iso. The lupe on the worm drive looks still ok. I will give it a try.
Just wait for a new battery because the old dallas is bad. I used that replacement for a cr1225

keep the old dallas chip for now. I've had some IBM machines not play nice with the new replacements. you might be forced to attach a new battery to the old chip.

Oh ok, thanks for the hint.
I also checked the HDD and the caps are leaking..
Did a quick clean( ISO and vinegar) and replace. Hope the HDD board surrived.
Also cleaned the connector.

before:

after:

I made some progress. First at all that cmos adapter also not really work for me. Sometimes the system dont even boot. So i mod the dallas and i got the 165 163 error on startup, so should be ok now.
But my floppy looks not so good. It try to read, but i got read error with the ref floppy disk. So i tryed first another floppy with same result, no read.
Beside of that i did also recap the mainboard. The system boots also fine into basic. So now i struggle with the floppy as you guys said before 😀

I made a short video, anyone an idea?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I6GlqRokV60

first thing that comes to mind. you need to be careful making disk images on windows. Microsoft just loves to leave is dirty dick beaters on EVERY disk you put into the machine. While this is not a problem for 99.999% of people, this will fubar a reference disk. I personally use Winimage, and IMMEDIATLY remove the disk after the writing process. If windows touches the disk it will corrupt it. There is a DOS utility somewhere on the internet that will restore a windows-touched disk to work as a reference disk.

even with 165/163 codes, it should still boot to DOS via floppy. Its very hard to troubleshoot this when you dont have any spare parts to swap out. If I was in your shoes, I'd look into a tested floppy disk off ebay (or a local IBM guy). Or having the drive serviced by someone. I'd wager, if you already knew how to service a floppy disk, you are likely are going to have done it already. In the basic, can you save and load a program from disk? doesnt need to be any real code, we are just checking for functionality.

Jackhead wrote on 2023-09-16, 12:37:

I made some progress. First at all that cmos adapter also not really work for me. Sometimes the system dont even boot. So i mod […]
Show full quote

I made some progress. First at all that cmos adapter also not really work for me. Sometimes the system dont even boot. So i mod the dallas and i got the 165 163 error on startup, so should be ok now.
But my floppy looks not so good. It try to read, but i got read error with the ref floppy disk. So i tryed first another floppy with same result, no read.
Beside of that i did also recap the mainboard. The system boots also fine into basic. So now i struggle with the floppy as you guys said before 😀

I made a short video, anyone an idea?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I6GlqRokV60

Hah welcome to the mess of PS/2 Floppy drives. Here are your options:

1. Basic drive maintenance - clean the heads with IPA, clear off old grease and put new stuff on the worm screw and gears that you can see. Unlikely to be the solution but this is also the easiest thing you can do.

2. Recap the floppy drive - what model floppy drive do you have? The ALPS ones in particular on these PS/2s seem to be very unreliable and the caps all seem to leak. I've had better luck with sony branded floppys (no idea why some were alps and some were different brands). Even after recapping my odds of success have not been good. I think some of these caps just eat away at so much of the PCBs and get into areas under chips and places you can't even see/test. I've spent many, MANY frustrating hours trying to fix/troubleshoot these things - probably my least enjoyable part of retro computing.

3. Modern cable to convert to standard floppy drive connection. For your type of floppy drive it would be this one: https://zzxio.com/product/34-pin-floppy-disk- … -ps-1-and-ps-2/
- Some floppy drives in the PS/2s had edge connectors instead of pin headers so these would take a different adapter. https://texelec.com/product/ibm-ps2-to-standa … floppy-adapter/
- Honestly this is what I would do if I was you. It isn't that expensive and as you can see, you can't actually do anything with the machine without being able to boot the reference disk off a floppy. Any standard floppy drive would then be able to connect up. Even if you try to recap the original drive it is still not guaranteed to work so either way this is probably a good option. If you don't have a standard 3.5" floppy you should be able to find one on ebay for a reasonable price.

It has the same behavia on the (original)dos floppys or ref disk comes with the mashine.
For me it looks like the worm drive looks ok, but it has problems with start reading/finding the track.
Maybe the head is bad. No clue.
Swapping part to test would be nice.

ok i do clean the wormdrive and add new lupe. Will see..
For me it not looks that its a big thing at all. Or at worst the head are bad than ok..

edit: after some more cleaning it reads the dos programm disk but give me this screen :