Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And this thing is the IBM Model 8590, or
the PS/2 Model 90 XP 486, which was IBM's first system built from the ground up
around the 486 CPU.
Announced in October of 1990 and costing anywhere from $12,500 on the low end to
$17,000, or more, fully equipped. Seriously. At the time of recording this, that is
the equivalent of paying $23,000 to $31,000 dollars
all for a computer running a 33 megahertz 486! And sure, all 486 PCs were
costly in 1990 but the model 90 from IBM here was at the very high end. For
example, for $57.99 you could buy a complete PC from Northgate with the same
33MHz 486 as the $17,000 PS/2... which didn't even come with a monitor by
the way. It was another $1000 for the IBM 8515 you see here. So what gives? What
kind of person was the Model 90 built for and why was it so ridiculously
expensive when competitors might cost a third of the price? Well let's take a look
at what it comes with and see if we can make some sense of it. And of course we
gotta go over some specs -- starting with the CPU, which was either a 25 or 33
megahertz 486 and it came in the SX or DX
varieties. And this one in particular has a 66MHz 486 DX2 from around 1993
installed. It also came with 4 megabytes of DRAM standard, up to a maximum of 64
megabytes. And my particular unit was configured with 32 megabytes, which is
still an insane amount for 1990. Integrated into the motherboard are a
PS/2 keyboard and mouse port, and yes this line of machines is why they are called
"PS/2" ports. As well as two serial ports, one parallel port, and one XGA video port.
XGA is the extended graphics array: a backwards compatible upgrade to VGA,
equipped with 512K of RAM and supporting up to 1024x768 resolution
at 16 colors. And of course mine has been upgraded, this one with a dedicated XGA-2
card complete with a full megabyte of memory, an upgrade that cost $1500. And it
allowed it to have the full resolution at 256 colors at once!
On the quite attractive front of the case there is an oddly standard three and a half
inch 1.44 meg floppy disk drive and a five and a quarter inch drive bay which
could be filled with either a floppy drive or this single speed CD-ROM.
Cutting edge stuff! And it added another $1,250 to the price. For peripherals, you
get the classic PS/2 mouse with its amusingly satisfying yet mushy buttons,
and the even more classic Model M keyboard which is just as wonderful to
use today as it was when it launched 33 years ago. A SCSI interface was
provided as well which controlled a 3.5 inch half-height hard
disk with 80, 160, or 320 megabyte capacities. Mine has once again been
upgraded to the 1 gig drive, which was indeed an option at the time. This one
obviously is a later drive but if it had been done in late 1990 it would have
been around $2500. Installed on the disk was IBM PC
DOS 5.0 as well as the optional Microsoft Windows 3.0! Of course it would
be quite appropriate to put OS/2 on here being that this is the PS/2 but I find 3
oddly charming so I like it this way. There were also four expansion slots
inside of the case, and nope that is not PCI or ISA you're seeing. This is one of
the PS/2s that used the 32-bit Micro Channel Architecture or "MCA."
Not only was MCA more expensive, of course, but it was also completely
proprietary to IBM. And that was very much intentional. With their earlier PCs,
IBM largely used off-the-shelf components like Intel processors and
Microsoft operating systems -- stuff that was available to anyone. So this meant
that manufacturers like Compaq could come along and clone the PC BIOS and its
internal bus architecture to make their own PCs for less money,
leading to IBM quickly losing its grip. And they weren't having it. So not only
did they release their own operating system, the aforementioned OS/2, but they
made a new proprietary 32-bit architecture that it could run on: Microchannel.
This is a super abbreviated version of the story of course, and the
entire "MCA versus ISA" battle is one that is well worth a dedicated video of its
own. But the gist of it is that MCA was a bid by IBM
try and take back control of the PC ecosystem by force in pretty much the
most heavy-handed, cynical, IBM way possible, which was to uninvite everyone
else from the 32-bit PC party unless you paid IBM for the pleasure. And not many
people did. Unfortunately that also means that MCA cards are tough to find,
especially for things like sound cards. So I stick to using external devices
like the OPL2LPT for Adlib support if I want anything beyond the PC speaker.
Another proprietary thing in here is that the MCA bus logic, CPU, and related
circuitry are installed in what IBM called the "processor complex." This was a
single board that could be upgraded or swapped out entirely as tech improved.
After all the Model 90 XP was also built with future-proofing in mind, with the "XP"
in the name standing for "expandable processor." Not only was it ready for the
upcoming 50MHz 486 but you could install a 256K RAM cache daughterboard
to the complex for *just* $2,000. The problem with all of this though is that
its high price simply wasn't justified by the performance compared to other
systems with similar specs. The model 90 XP and other PS/2 machines simply held
their own without really pushing well beyond the competition. Sure it would
have been mind-bogglingly quick for a home computer, but the 90 XP was never
meant for that. IBM sold machines like the PS/2 Model 30 in the PS/1 Color System
for home users, and those had much more reasonable specs and price tags to match.
But the Model 90? No. No, that instead was meant for professionals and businesses,
people that needed workstation performance for things like CAD work and
financial modeling. You know, nothing fun like Commander Keen, boring IBM stuff!
So keeping those particular uses in mind, as well as all of the ridiculous amounts of
cutting-edge tech in here, the price actually wasn't *that* exorbitant. It was
just this was expensive tech, and coming from IBM it was gonna cost even more.
Then, it could do so many different things for so many different types of
users. For example it could also act as a
capable server machine, which is even more apparent with the closely-related
Model 95 series. And you thought the 90 XP was expensive! This big beast is on
another level. But that'll have to wait for another day, and for now I hope you
enjoyed this look back at the PS/2 model 90 XP 486. If anything it cracks me up to
have a computer that cost nearly as much as three 1991 base model Honda Civics
and I'm just sitting here using it to play SkiFree. And if you enjoyed this
video on the IBM PS/2 Model 90 then perhaps you would like to see some of my
other PS/2-related videos -- or any number of other retro hardware and software and
tech things that I cover here on LGR. New videos every Monday and Friday and as
always, thank you very much for watching!