IBM PS/2 P70 Restoration and Demo (gas plasma display) - Part 2!
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- Опубліковано 29 сер 2018
- This is part 2 of my diagnosis, repair and restoration video on IBM's "luggable" version of their PS/2, the P70. In this video I get the computer working again, solving several problems along the way, and then demo some of the software on the machine as displayed on its beautiful gas plasma screen. Yes, it's a portable computer with a PLASMA screen!
If you missed it, here's Part 1 of this two-part series: • IBM PS/2 P70 Tour and ...
If you want one of these, I'd love it if you followed my Ebay link: ebay.to/2wsHsyw
IBM gas plasma promo video: • 1985 IBM computer disp...
Computer Chronicles episode with this machine: • 1989 New Laptops Seaso...
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I’m willing to bet that the previous owner couldn’t wipe the drive because the pc broke, and she took it to a “repair shop” which did that to the math coprocessor
Sounds plausible.
Wow that's a hell of a backstory! :O :D
can confirm, I was that "really smart nephew" once
Considering the kind of software she had on this machine, I don't think she relied on someone else to finance a new computer.
Today I learned why Peter's nephew doesn't like him so bad as to bend all his FPU pins and say it was an accident :p
Lenovo missed an opportunity to market a beige ThinkPad P70 as a tribute to this old beast.
they did a tribute to the thinkpad still :)
@@NonsensicalSpudz but the thinkpad 25 sucks
If Lenovo Marketed a Retro IBM-PC 8086 / Model 30 / etc with all the newest tech goodness inside - I think many people would buy them...
Even make a 'CRT' style LED display, that would have the same outer edges, and only an inch deep, or a lid on top to use the CRT box / form as storage for your misc. pens and pencils, etc... :-)
I had two P70's back in the day for work, I remember lugging one in a backpack on a bicycle riding to work, it was portable but heavy. The gas plasma display was wonderful, I wrote a C program to do vga color palette cycling that was quite mesmerising. Thanks for your resurrection of the P70 :-)
How have I not seen this channel before? You're like a more technical LGR. Perfect presentation, relaxing delivery, instant sub!
Dude, Hard Drivin'! I spent days playing the port of that on my dad's old Amiga when I was a kid!
I can't tell you how much nostalgia that little clip at the end brought me.
That's an awesome fix and an awesome video man. Thank you for documenting this! So glad your persistence paid off. Totally worth it getting this excellent piece of history functional again.
Awesome to see this machine running again!! It is a thing of beauty!! Love those orange plasma screens :)
Thank you for the detailed information... I worked on a few of these in the 90's at my first PC shop... And oh boy any PS/2 system is fun fun fun to diagnose and repair!!!
Wow! An absolutely phenomenal effort to get this baby working again. Amazing job!
Awe inspiring project and video. I have to admire your dedication to go to the end of this project despite the many hurdles.
Hey just want you to know I'm happy that other people out here like you not understand the significance of these Technologies and these machines I appreciate your time and effort in restoring and protecting these valuable artifacts in computer history that's so many of us fail to understand their significance and importance thank you I hope that you're having a good day today and that all continues to go well it is my dream one day to own one of these as well and many other examples of amazing early computer work I also have to admit I love that gas display monitor
What a cool fun little project, thanks for sharing it with us!
Love your videos! FS 3.0 was my first computer game in 1988. I ran it on a Compaq 386sx-25 laptop that weighed 16 pounds and cost $5,000. Sixteen shades of grey.
Glorious screen indeed, great restoration and beautiful machine.
Nice restoration video. The detail you provide is great. -- Its amazing what these sold for back in the day. Thanks for making and sharing this.
I have never even seen one of these before, it’s a really sharp computer. Thanks for sharing. I have a really tweaked out 386DX-40 and Doom ran pretty smoothly on it.
I remember evaluating one of those at work, back in the day. It was pretty cool and ridiculously expensive. I did loved that plasma display.
What year would this have been? I have one myself that my dad rescued out of the bin back in the late 90s... I'm currently restoring it and trying to imagine what things were like back when it was brand new.
Holy crap! I stumbled across this video and my father had one of these!!
He absolutely hated it! Lol
It was hard to find a compatible vga monitor back then, AND his hinges broke and then the plasma screen died, all in the span of like 1 month. He got rid of it so fast haha. Great video!!
We had loads of P70s and P75s where I worked in the early 1990s. A common problem we came across was a 301 error which I think was a keyboard error message. Good hardware for its day though and a good video. I'm glad you got past the problems in the previous video.
Those ALPS keyboard switches are a treat to listen to, despite the hollow sound from the reduced-density materials they used in the keyboard.
The best keyboard sound is the Commodore PET 4032 and 8032. watch 'bits and bytes' episode on programming...its a delight. Its also featured in episode one.
Thank you for this series. I was able to repair a p75 with your previous video on the floppy drive. I found that with some modification to the drive, I was able to make a standard floppy fit. Even supporting the old eject button albeit with some filing.
Absolutely fantastic work, totally praiseworthy. I've always been in love with these orange plasma displays. Reminds me of a nixie tube, in display form. That warm orange glow is like something out of Blade Runner.
Yes - I wish I'd thought of that comparison to put in the script. It does remind me of nixie tubes as well.
Thanks for this nostalgic moment. Great job to put piece of back in proper working order. Back then, my they surely designed a floppy drive assembly, so that many decade later a standard 6" smartphone can fit in there, while the drive from my former japanese employer is being repared...
What a journey, thanks for putting in the time!
An amazing piece of hardware - great job!
It's the orange screen that really makes this unit stand out. Great 2 part video, and I think I have to go shopping to see if I can find one of these units.
Congratulations for restoring it, and the former owners did had left awesome stuff on it.
And that plasma screen is really amezing.
It's amazing the amount of work you put into this...fantastic job restoring it!
Also, I love the monitor's "compatible with Windows 7" sticker at ~20:00 lol
Nice video. I miss the 80's. Remember my first 286, then 386SX and then 486Sx and on and on. I'm glad that a pc last longer these days.
I have about 18 vintage portable computers I have collected over the years, I have always wished for one of these but they are too expensive for me in any where near a working condition.
I just finished rebuilding a Compaq portable 3 including replacing the horrible disintegrating keyboard cable with a new one, it looks really good now.
Nice! I want to start collecting right now. I love the IBM P70 and also the Compaq Portable 3. What is your favorite?
@@johnroady9495 I like my Amstrad 640 Pc it’s so weird with a black and white pop up display and runs on D batteries. I have windows version 1 on it.
@@Tristinfate Wow! That one is indeed a cool one! I will do some research on it, thanks!
Really enjoyed this and seeing your process to get it working.
Oh... This is the first PC I had ever... Thanks for bringing my memories back ;)
i really love that orange font!!! 18:03 that looks great! " California Dreams is a defunct Polish computer video game developer that published games between 1987 and 1991. It contributed to the development of computer games in the late 1980s with titles such as Blockout, Street Rod, and Street Rod 2."
Many thanks for bringing to life this beautiful and rare piece of hardware. Wonderful videos that make the mind well, thank you very much! I already signed up and left my like, sorry I can not give 1000 likes
Thanks!
When I bought a monochrome monitor I chose this color ver the green slow fade. I remember stacker and double space. I did use stacker for about 6 months. I enjoyed the look back
Well done! I'm glad you were able to restore this one to the degree you did.
And good note about framerates back in the day. We really put up with a lot of slow gameplay with ease, just dealing with the setup we had and the limitations thereof. Heck even in the N64 era we finally got Perfect Dark and upon playing it again on original hardware many years later... wow, it's amazing how flexible we were and didn't notice things feeling clunky.
I know Doom ran decent on our old 486 (which we kept around and now I have perched on the top level of my desk) but not amazing these days until I upgraded the processor from the measily 25mhz 486SX.
I remember the original Doom being pretty smooth on my 486SX25 (which was my first PC), but *lots* of other games in the year or two after ran like crap until I upgraded to a DX2/66, and then even more ran like crap until I finally upgraded that to a Pentium II. Before I had my 486, I had an Apple II, and you can just imagine what kind of frame rates I was getting in games in 1993 on an Apple II.
Man, IBM sells a machine for more than $8,000, and they don't even make the hinges out of metal. I'd be pissed if I broke a P70 because IBM cut corners with the hinges.
It's definitely a weak point on these. But I'm not sure how long it took for it to really be a problem. Today I can actually visually see that the hinges are broken in most other pics and videos of these made by others, but it might have taken 20 years for that to start to happen. I also think that, judging by those same other pics and vids, most people probably don't even know it if their hinges break. I didn't realize it at first on mine.
I have a $4,000 disk drive (in 1970's money) and it has a plastic loading mechanism. Ironically, everything else on it is made out of thick steel and machined aluminum. It's odd when companies do stuff like that on products that are going to cost a fortune to the buyer. It doesn't matter if it might last 20 years...you just don't do it. One day, I'll be making a replacement out of a dozen metal parts by hand for that drive.
It could be worse. I have an old Apple Powerbook 145 and it is literally falling apart. The plastics just shatter at the lightest touch - simply because of old age. But funny enough those have the opposite problem to this IBM. The hinges are metal, but they are screwed directly into plastic with the use of inserts. So you can pretty much forget about permanently fixing that. At least you can use a professional 3d printing service to make a replacement hinge, but printing a whole new case for that would simply cost a fortune.
Candieman Maybe they thought plastic was better for the desired combination of weight and movement.
The hinges may have been that flimsy because it wasn't made to last 20 years. I do agree that they should've made them out of metal, just because that seems like the proper way to do it. I don't want to make things just strong enough to last for the waranty period, I want them to be strong and reliable.
I remember this machine fondly and found this video while searching for it. I had one of these machines back in the late 1980s. It was loaned to my employer by IBM for a project, and came in a beautiful leather Hartmann carrying case. This was the first 386 machine I worked on, ran like a bat out of hell compared to the PCs I had used before that time and I used it to develop software under contract for IBM (I think it may have been IBM Professional FORTRAN for the PC). But I swear it was before 1989, maybe as early as 1987 and I remember using it for a couple of years before returning it sometime in the summer or early fall of 1989. Maybe it wasn't as long as I thought, or maybe it was a predecessor of the P70, or maybe it was an advance version, but it sure looked like a finished product to me. I loved the clicky keyboard as well and used IBM and later Northgate keyboards like that for years (with a lot of complaining from coworkers). The plasma display was also just fantastic, razor sharp for displays at the time, and great for writing code.
One of my favorite luggables! You gave it proper love. Those ancient parts graveyard websites are the worst when you're looking for replacement displays :|
hey modern classic, this is the first video i have seen from you, i just subbed and i cannot wait to see what else you have!!!!!
i have one of these, haven't touched it in years. great video :)
I know people love that clicky keyboard sound but that noise caused many fights in my house as a kid. When your family computer is in the same room as your TV (common in the 90s), patience wears thin between 3 brothers, as the clicks overtake the sound of Night Rider reruns.
Awesome machine, and glad you got it working again. :-)
Beautiful! Lovely machine. And your tech skills are admirable.
Thanks!
Ooooh, Blockout brings back memories. Played it to exhaustion on the Amiga 500. ❤️
Amazing video mate! Such a cool machine. Was already going to comment that I would've loved to see Hard Driving on that display, but it seems you were a step ahead. :)
WOW !!! I remember playing Hard Drivin at the local arcade. It was one of my favorites because it was the only driving game I knew of that had a clutch pedal and gear shifter.
Congrats. It’s always satisfying to see a happy ending.
My uncle worked for IBM and in the 90s this was his home PC. I would hang out over there and install Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and play that on the screen. He had an external CRT hooked up for color, but i'd unhook it to marvel at the amber plasma screen and how good the picture quality was despite being a flat panel display from the 80s.
I'm using one of the these as a foot rest. I couldn't boot it but after this video now I might give it another go.
I grew up playing Doom on my 386DX-25, using the low detail setting (F5 key I think). I still remember my parents having to pay about $250 for 4MB of RAM on 30 pin SIMMs back when I built it. My next machine was an AMD 5x86-133. It felt like a supercomputer compared to the 386 LOL.
Ya I skipped the 80486 too. I had a 386 DX-33 with I think 1MB of EMS + the standard 640K+384K 'shadow cache for TSRs and for use by HIMEM', and I remember using the '-' key to reduce the screen size. I only had to shrink it a little. Eventually, I had 4MBs. This suited well until Rise of the Triad, which ran with 4, but it gimped the game. When we got 8MB of RAM, all of the sudden there were tons of new bad guys in the game that weren't there before. My next computer was an AMD K5 I think. I played diablo on that, and starcraft. That era after the 486 was all AMD for home builds. They ruled the speed world.
Peter Lamont Technically speaking, the AMD 5x86-133 was nothing but a hopped up 486 DX4 CPU (with 16KB L1 write-back cache) that was the speed of a P5 Pentium 60-75MHz (Depending on application of course!), but still fit in a cheaper socket 3 (yay VLB!) mainboard.
tin pin It was their first processor designed from the ground up. In fact it wasn't an intel licensed chip. They did some redesigning on the thing. While it didn't have the hardware logarithmic floating point unit that Intel developed(which admittedly, was way faster for floating point and a major breakthrough of pure genius), the K5 was faster at integer math than the intel was pound for pound...and it would also do the faster math, at double the speed of intel. The K5 is not just a 486 CPU for that reason. 80486 didn't have predictive branching either. The K5 did. That was a major step forward, and it is why the L1 cache has to be large enough. In short, it is so different to the 80486 that AMD was able to, for the first time in almost 30 years, not pay intel a license to build their processor. That is huge! Of all the processors you could say were just Intel mimicry, this one has the least claim. In fact there were doubts about the 100% compatibility, which is why the initial releases were below 100mhz.
The Am5x86 ≠ AMD K5. The K5 was the socket 5/7 "Pentium compatible" _successor_ to the socket 3 Am5x86, and was indeed the in-house design you describe. However the 5x86, despite the nomenclature employed, was still a 486 class CPU and was the last with its roots in the Intel design.
en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/am5x86
en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/k5
tin pin I appreciate the links, but I am already well read on the subject. I don't care what that article says about it...They say that because it is instruction compatible with the 486. If this is all you need to define it as a 486, then fine. However, this ignores all of its innovations. If I created a discrete 486 from transistors and added features, would you still call it a 486?
This is not an argument that can be won or lost unless you are very familiar with cpu architecture and digital logic. If you are, I invite you to disqualify my arguments. Otherwise, you are arguing from incredulity.
Now this is going on my list of PC's to get sometime. I knew about the Compaq one, but I didn't know about this one. This one seems even nicer than the Compaq one.
that's a beautiful computer, great job!!! (shout out from Italy)
I always liked plasma displays. My Grandma had a Toshiba 3100. Had a 640x400 plasma EGA display that could even do shades. Had a few 8-bit isa slots too. It was nice to use a laptop with a display that didn't ghost all the time, color or not.
Nice job! I have never seen this model before. I asume this was IBM's answer to the Compaq Portable 386 which was very popular at that time. I can remember delivering a lot of them to customers.
There were a couple of models before this, but yes, I'm pretty sure Compaq's portable line came first, and IBM was initially reacting to them. I think both IBM and Compaq were on their third "luggable" by this time.
One of those got me through uni in the mid 90's and yes, Doom on it was an "experience"
My best friend had one of these when we were kids, the first time I ever played Doom was on one! Doom, Jeopardy, and Epic Pinball were all games we regularly played on it.
OMGGGGGGGGG! IVE SOOO BEEN WAITING FOR THIS!
14 pin adapter? My IBM monitor "adapter" is pliers. Great video! I love those lunch box systems!
19:30 Wow! that looks really good! I never knew one of those old monochrome screen laptops could even do output of display.
I don't think it was a standard thing among traditional clamshell laptops at that point. I think it's something IBM and a few other manufacturers of these "luggables" did because they wanted people to think of these as portable desktop computers.
So cool PC
It looks and works now AWSOME!
Did anyone make the Crysis joke yet?
How did the chicken cross the road? Crysis
I never had any trouble with Stacker. Loved it. DoubleSpace, on the other hand, was a great way to lose your data.
A lot of people wouldn't use DriveSpace at first, after being burnt by DoubleSpace.
Awesome ending to this journey! What a beautiful machine. If you want a cheaper alternative for a sound card you could consider an OPL2LPT.
Nice work man .loved it
Oh boy! I remember Stacker! It almost doubled the size of my computers 40MB HDD. Good old times.
Last month a neighbor had died and the house was/is being renovated. To my suprise, an IBM 8513 display showed up on the curb/trash night. As a CRT collector I had to stop. It's in nice shape and does work too, luckily I have an older Pentium 3 in my attic to test.
Not sure of my plan for it yet. I will say though, my first monitor was a CGA/LaserXT IBM clone so even in 2018 I was excited for a real IBM VGA. (Or is it technically EGA?) haha
Thanks for the videos, you always have good content/info.
At one of my first jobs in the 90's, i had two of those on my desk one day with an order "Do whatever you need to do to get one working".
It was one of the managers "babies" and it was a prioritized job so i set out to fix it. The screen was broken so it was an easy fix. I checked out if there were any spare parts for it, but even though they were still available for order from IBM in 1997, they were extremely expensive.
Just the screen was $800, so i thought that the rest of the parts were still expensive to i broke down the spares machine into parts so someone else could use those parts fix it in the future.
That was also the year when i bought my first laptop, an AST Ascentia 900N. I got some spare parts from my employer for it when we cleaned out a storage area, weirdest thing i got was a Japanese keyboard.
That tetris version is the original PC version designed with a 8088/8086 running @4.7mhz. Its pace was dictated by the speed of the processor, so running it on a 386 made it a lot more difficult. I know because I loved this game and was first playing it on a green screen hercules on an 8088. Try it again on a slower machine, then you can really appreciate it :)
Well that explains that. I believe I started it on the middle difficulty level and it was like I was in a 100 meter dash. That was also really the only time I played it so I didn't know what keys did what, and somehow the key to turn a piece right did not seem near the key to turn a piece left. This was the version the owner had installed, though, so maybe they were just really good at it.
Modern Classic That's right, L2 on a 80386 @33MHz was the speed of L10 on the 8088. Great channel and video, does this machine have a turbo button to slow the machine down?
I'd love to try playing that on my 8086, but my CRT can't do 350 line mode.
You can always use one of the utilities to slowndown cpu. Google is your friend. I know this because I had a 386 and some friends where using earlier pc's like 286 and older. Most of the very early games did run to fast. One of those might already be in the dos folder You would type "slowdown" and then type the game back then. and after hat reboot..
OH MAN! I had the SAME 1987 Spectrum Holobyte Tetris on an 8086 clone of some sort.. Not sure who made it, its long gone now :( I loved that version of the game!
great video, what an interesting weird machine. I loved doom in monochromatic!! hahaha, I love monochromatic monitors!!! not only your eyes get used to them, some things look "better" on them!.
Oh man! So much cool history stored on that machine! I haven't seen that Prodigy splash page in years. I wish you WOULD have opened Procomm though! I used to use that all the time before switching to something called QModem, I think. I hope you archive that software. I've never tried to see if it exists out there somewhere else. I'm glad you got this sweet machine back up and running! I was beginning to wonder if you had given up ;)
Nice! I got mine today! It has IBM DOS 6.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on it and some strange land survey software called Traverse PC.
Awesome topic and a great quality video that's right up my alley! Definitely +subbing and hitting the notify bell for you man!
Wow. I haven't seen one of these in a long time. A company I used to work for had some of these for the research department staff who needed to take a computer to the site of where they were running a focus group. Glad to see you got it working. You were working with some larger sized surface mount parts. Those aren't that hard to solder. As the parts get smaller it gets more difficult if you aren't used to it. The one problem can be keeping the part in the right place while you solder one end. The upper lead of the cap shown at 2:00 looks like it should be bent so it is more vertical. It appears to be too close to the bottom left pin of the HA 13440 IC and almost touching some other pad(s) close to the radial cap body.
Nice work. I have an old 486/50 Compaq Presario that I am going to attempt to get working again so I can play Doom, Ultima Underworld and Falcon 3.0 on their historical platforms! Wish me luck!
that thing is amazing great job
Remember when everyone had to have a plasma TV, 15 years ago? Plasma was the future.
what a clean machine special the keybord
Communications Canada sticker on the modem :) I remember the same thing on the modem on my dad's PS/1 from almost 30 years ago...
Beautiful machine.
I also love the commodore 64 that also looked like this case.
Not sure if you still see these messages. I do still have a P70 that does run. I was the original user of this machine and have both Token Ring 4/16 and 10MB Ethernet cards in it. I used it mainly as a trace and performance diagnostic tool (IBM Trace and Performance using OS/2 Warp) for customer networks. It is set up as a dual boot machine with OS/2 and Windows 3.1.
I was an IBM Systems Engineer and received this machine new and somehow kept it running for years then put it on the shelf. When I left in the car overnight in the winter it would blow snow out the back when I powered it up without letting it warm up. This ran like a tank and nothing and nothing is broken. The key to keeping it running was to keep the collection of Reference diskettes and change the CMOS battery once in a while.
Great system. The display is somewhat reminiscent of the legendary Plato 3.
Amazing...thank's for show this video. :)
As for red turning black (or blue for that matter) is because the gas plasma is only pulling from the green channel. Generally anything using a standard palette will get a "weighted" greyscale look, meaning green is bright, red is not as bright, and blue is dark, but are still there. For games however like Doom (or even Windows for that matter), it simply writes a custom palette to be used and thus overwrites the monochrome specific palette.
I have a Model 25 with a VGA card I installed, and wired up a custom harness. The VGA card outputs gray scale since I set the sense pins as such, but on some software like Wolfenstein 3D (8086 version), the card starts outputting color rather than gray scale, and thus the CRT starts looking just like your gas plasma, everything but red and blue.
I had one with a microchannel soundblaster. And yes, I ran Doom on it.
Excellent machine at the time. Too many problems/non standard parts to run as a retro rig today :(
This looks like a post futuristic Virtual Boy. The games look amazing in monochrome orange/red!
this is so interesting. I have never seen this computer and the screen is so cool! I have also never seen win 3.1. the UI is so weird and interesting.
nice machine... great work. Block-out looks really 80's retrofuturism (as you said) the best on it.
It reminds on TRON or Nintendo glasses. A pity that the extended dual-monitor does not work...
a "cyber-DOOM-mod" would look fantastic.
I just found your channel, awesome Video :)
Man, I remember having a "laptop" with an orange plasma screen and a busted CMOS battery. I spent so much time as a kid just fidding with the BIOS and the settings, occasionally getting it to boot to DOS (I was *very* young, so I didn't even think to take notes... nor did I know any English at the time). I knew how to start Lemmings from the command prompt though. :D
Awesome vid!
You can always get one of the Cyrus 486dlc overdrive ships for it, even a regular cyrix 486dlc but at the limited 20mhz but that depends if you want a authentic system or a faster one , interesting enough IBM actually made a verient of called the IBM 486SL that used in a lot of overdrive boards so authenticity wise I wouldn't bat a eye at some one doing that sort of a upgrade
There is a makerspace in Michigan (National science institute) with a CNC the plastic hinges look simple enough to cut out of solid aluminium but you will have to hunt down a makerspace close to you with a CNC
I would cast the parts out of zinc using plaster molds...he could do that in his kitchen.
excellent vid, top notch
I used a large plasma screen on my 3270 terminal, the screen allowed for multiple sessions at once. It split into 4 way and you could switch back and forth to any terminal or run all at once. It was a 19" if I remember correctly.
8:51 The smartphone fits so well on the site I start to wonder if the manufacturer had seen into the future...
My king ant borrowed this one from work. Heavy and huge, but nice! I played DOOM shareware, Golden Axe, etc. on it. No sound card though. :O
I used to carry one of these back in the days. It was so heavy and it came in a leather type case . It had an SDLC card inside. And no I do not miss it. This retro thing is definitely a millennial thing.
Aahh, Blockout! One of the few games that ran on the 256K family 8086 back in the day. :)
I was surprised to see the game folder for the game elite. But it was a pretty impressive game for it's time. Especially when it was released for the BBC Micro B.