Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing!
An LGR restoration thing.
[PS/2 sliding into your video]
This right here is a machine from 1987: the IBM Personal
System/2 Model 30.
And as you can see it has seen better days.
I got this pretty cheap on eBay a while back.
It's just not in great shape, it needs a good bit of work.
But that's okay, I was just happy to get one of these early models of a Personal System/2.
They had the Model 60 and 80 and stuff like that.
I have those but I did not have one of the quote unquote “cheap” ones that IBM was
selling in ‘87.
So I thought this would do nicely for an upcoming video that I have planned on the Personal
System/2 line and as is obvious it's covered in all sorts of grime
and gooey residue and tape and marker.
And somebody even scratched out the little sticker on the front here that would normally
show like the serial number and the precise model number and everything.
I don't know what this thing went through but I found it sad.
And this power switch is not doing what it's supposed to either, it's just kind of flopping around.
[floptaplop]
There's no give in it whatsoever, so that's gonna need to be fixed and then
there's this empty bay in the front here which, depending on the model of Model 30 that you
got from IBM, would have had either a second floppy disk drive or it would be filled up
with a 20 or 30 megabyte hard disk drive.
And that is what this one originally had because the model number exactly that IBM referred
to this was the 8530-021, meaning that it came with the hard disk.
It also has some sort of networking card installed around back.
Not really sure what that is exactly yet but I suppose we'll see inside and perhaps that'll
be a clue as to what this did in a past life.
Getting inside the Model 30 is pretty simple, all you need is a Torx head screwdriver with
the correct head size.
And there are four of these screws around the edges of the case.
Then once they’re undone they actually don't come out of the case, which is kind of nice,
you're not gonna lose anything.
They just sort of dangle in there and they're spring-loaded,
these have individual springs on them.
And then the top of the case just slides off here, and yes: this is all plastic.
The bottom of the chassis is metal but yeah, this is one of the cost-saving measures that
IBM went to for these models of Personal System/2s.
Speaking of cost-saving measures, I assume: here's that power switch and as you can see
there's just a metal rod that goes between the power switch on the front of the case
and this toggle on the power supply itself.
It looks like that just sort of popped out of there at some point so whatever man.
All you gotta do is pop it back in place and it works just fine!
Not the most robust power toggle I've ever seen
but hey, at least the rod is metal and not plastic.
Unlike some of my Packard Bells...
All right over in the drive bay here we have the double-sided double density three and
a half inch floppy disk drive over here, it's a Mitsubishi model.
And then on the right we have the other side of the floppy disk cable just in case we want
to put another floppy drive there.
But we don't, we're gonna be putting a hard disk if all goes well.
And unlike many earlier IBM personal computers the 8530 has a hard disk controller built
into the motherboard.
However, look at that 44-pin connector.
That's not any of the usual suspects like SCSI, IDE, or even MFM.
A bunch of PS/2 machines used something called ESDI or Enhanced Small Disk Interface, which
looking online it seemed that's what this came with.
Not only is it a little strange in that regard but there are no power cables coming from
the power supply to plug into a hard drive, assuming I could find the right one.
On this machine the power actually goes through the connector on the hard disk or floppy disk
controller through the cable directly into the drive.
So there is no separate power cable, meaning that if I do put a hard disk in here It's
going to have to be one that is compatible with this and I'm gonna have to find the correct cable.
Anyway right here on the board you can see the CPU,
it's an Intel 8086-2 on this original Model 30.
There's also a later one with a 286 installed.
And this blank socket right here is for the optional math coprocessor, the 8087, which
I probably won't be putting in here.
Over towards the middle of the motherboard you'll see this riser card.
And this provides the expandability options for this machine,
which comes in the form of three ISA slots.
And it also has a battery on the riser as well, I was not expecting
to see this kind of thing on there.
Most of what I read online said that these normally came with like a Dallas real time
clock chip but this came with one of these barrel batteries.
And yeah, you know, I don't like keeping these things around but we're gonna see if it works first.
And then here is that gigantic networking card.
This was not standard to the machine, whoever had this or -- whatever company used this
had installed it at one point.
We'll find out what it is a little bit later.
But enough looking around, let's go ahead and get to some cleaning!
Starting with a little compressed air and tossing these dust bunnies out of the way.
And I'm not gonna give this an *extremely* deep cleaning because really, I have a lot
of Personal System/2 units that I want to show in an upcoming video and I just kind
of want to get this one in a presentable shape and feeling nice and clean, relatively speaking.
I'm just going over everything with an assortment of anti-static brushes and getting all this
stuff kind of cleaned up and feeling decent.
Because really, other than the caked-on dust it's not in bad shape.
I was really hoping there were no weird leakages or rust bits or yeah you know, who knows.
There's all sorts of junk that can go wrong on these older computers depending on how
they've been stored and for how long and where.
But all things considered I mean, it's mostly the outside that looked really bad,
the inside was just dusty.
Alright I'm curious about this other half of the board and this gigantic networking
card is in the way so we'll get that out of there.
And here we go!
There is a lot more dust over here, that's for sure.
Oh well, nothing a bit of brushing and some time can't help.
And gonna go ahead and take out the RAM sticks here.
And from the factory my Model 30 came with 640 kilobytes of usable conventional memory
with some on the motherboard and these sticks providing 256k each.
Just gonna dust these things off because it makes me happy and hey look at that.
Already looking a lot better compared to how it was.
The contacts in there actually looked pretty good, so just sort of spraying them down with
some compressed air and stick the RAM sticks back in there with some highly satisfying
clicks, mmm. [satisfying clickity clicks] Welp time to brush down the rest of this and
spray it and all that good stuff.
[compressed air sounds] Oh Yeah, that is way better.
It's a rather attractive looking board with those yellow chips
and a kind of amber theme going on, I like it.
And I'm just gonna stick the networking card back in there,
although I don't anticipate using it.
I'm just curious what it'll do, if anything, on startup.
I'm pretty pleased with the interior of the machine for the time being so I'll go ahead
and start wiping down the exterior starting with the rear of the thing here.
And just using a microfiber dusting cloth and my anti-static brushes again, just sort
of loosening up all the dirt and grime as much as I can.
Ah, and one of the simple but great pleasures of restoring and cleaning up an older computer:
exhaust fans + compressed air.
[compressed air rapidly rotating the fan]
Yeah I don't know why that's fun but it is.
And yeah, this is completely unnecessary but I got one of these little detailing brushes
because they're kind of cool.
just has these rubber tips and you can go over all the little nooks and crannies and
crevices and -- I don't know if it's actually helping but it makes me feel better.
Now let's start addressing some of these stupid stickers and junk on the rest of the case.
Thankfully this one peeled right off of there and didn't seem to leave much residue at all,
just sort of came off in one go and I used the sticker to unstick the rest of it.
Then there's this unfortunate little serial number label that
has been scraped off for whatever reason.
So I'm just gonna try to finish the job with a light scraping of a screwdriver and since
it was already scraped into I didn't feel too bad about doing that.
Not the most ideal outcome but it'll do for now.
Then there's this permanent marker in an “L” shape and this can be tricky due to the texture
on IBMs from this era.
Ink like this and really grime in general tends to sink into that powder-like coating and ugh.
First thing I tried was some high-strength alcohol and that didn't do much.
Next I tried the old dry erase marker trick which often works on fresher, permanent ink
but had very little effect here on this textured surface.
Next I tried some goo remover and while that loosened things up after a few minutes, it
still wasn't going as deep as I wanted.
So it was down to one of those “magical” melamine cleaning sponges.
And while this has the potential to smooth out the coating if you scrub too hard -- and
I don't like doing that -- just taking it slow and steady seemed to do the job nicely
you can hardly tell that L-shaped marker stain was there.
Next I'm just gonna wipe down a lot of the rest of the outside of the case with a bit
of distilled water and vinegar mix just to get the loose grimy crap off of there.
And I got another one of these detailing brushes to get in there with the power switch.
This was probably the dirtiest part of the front of the case actually, just a lot of
gunk built up over time with a bunch of fingers and storage conditions doing their thing.
And then also near the power switch on the front of the case here there were these little
spots where it looked like the machine had been bumped up against something kind of hard
and it had left like a blue smear just on the tips of these corners.
And I'm just kind of going around the outside of it here very lightly to get rid of a couple
little spots that were annoying and it did pretty well, I thought.
There's only one little area here, looks like there was a sticker there at one point that
was preventing more yellowing.
But yeah overall I'm pretty happy with the way this is turning out already!
And now to get to the top outside portion of the case here.
And we're gonna start with that big ol’ wide masking tape strip that's been torn off
and is just looking ugly at this point.
And I'm just gonna use one of these decal removers with a plastic razor blade just to
kind of get it started so I can hopefully peel it off in one go, and that piece worked just fine.
And the second one proved to be a little bit more challenging but again, just taking it
slowly and carefully and there we go!
It came off as well pretty much in one piece.
And that plastic blade is soft enough that it didn't do any damage to the case plastic itself.
And before we start going all elbow grease and trying to get rid of that gooey stuff,
I’m just kinda gonna wipe down the rest of this a little bit.
It's kind of a light layer of dirt and griminess,
made the whole thing feel really kind of gross to touch.
And yeah, a bit of goo remover here and it got rid of most of that residue from the tape.
There was still some more stubborn junk that I ended up using a magic eraser on so yeah,
that's what I ended up doing for most of the rest of the top of the case here.
And unfortunately it's not gonna get rid of absolutely everything, there were some deeper
scratches and a couple spots with just some really stubborn stains.
But thankfully it's not terribly noticeable when it's all cleaned up like this.
At least on camera, you can notice a little bit more in person I think.
And let’s go ahead and put it back together here, and yeah man, I'm pretty pleased.
I can tell that the front of the case here has yellowed just a bit compared to the top
of the case in, you know, a couple little spots.
I'd say that's a pretty decent improvement for having spent just
a couple hours using very basic cleaning stuff.
And now that I have that power switch hopefully fixed up we can try and plug this thing up
and turn it on and see if it actually works!
I have not actually attempted to power this thing on yet.
Now this does use MCGA graphics but a normal VGA monitor will work as long as you have
the proper cable -- you just kinda have to remove one of the pins.
But yeah let’s power it on and see what we get!
[CLICK of the power switch, whirring of the fan]
All right well, that's a good sign!
No concerning explosions or smokes or beeps or anything like that.
And we have the full 640k, nice!
[BEEP!]
And well, it looks like it is doing the networking card things.
“Network Controls International 4700 PCI.”
Well, that's not a PCI card, that's kind of odd.
And yeah, it just goes to this no matter what I do.
I could put a disk in there, I can try to do anything on the keyboard.
Nope, it goes directly to this interface every single time I start it up.
So it turns out that the card that's in here is a 3270 coax adapter which provides the
NCI 4700 services.
There's a PCI version and all sorts of stuff, but basically what this does is it allows
your PC to fully emulate IBM 4704 and 3278 display terminals.
So yeah it's just some kind of a terminal emulation thing going on and I guess this
is probably what this was used for at some point in the past.
And while that's kind of neat and I will be holding on to the card, just on the off chance
I can do something with it someday, I'm gonna go ahead and take it out here because it is
preventing me from booting the computer how I want to.
[CLACK!]
Ouch, that hurt a little bit.
Ended up cutting myself on the edge of the case when I was pulling that card out so uh.
Yeah.
The perils of working with PCs. That thing was bleeding pretty good.
[BEEP!]
Anyway, as soon as the card was out of there and yeah this is what I was expecting to see
at the very start.
Just the standard startup screen that you see in a lot of PS/2s and it's just telling
you to insert a disk because yeah.
There's no hard drive right now, no operating system, so it needs something.
And there we go, I mean.
Honestly I could stop right here and just leave the computer as-is because you can't
just run this straight from a floppy disk.
I could put DOS in there and boot right from it and then maybe just get another faceplate
and cover it up, but you know?
I really do want to get a hard drive installed so let's see what we can do about that.
Unfortunately, I do not have the proper hard disk on hand, so while we're waiting for one
to show up from eBay let's go ahead and address
some of the yellowing going on with the front of the case.
We're gonna start with this floppy disk front panel here.
And this just pops right off, there's two little pins on the back that you push down
and the floppy drive itself pops out with this little tab -- you pull up on that and
the whole thing slides out just like that.
Unfortunately getting the front assembly of the case off is a little bit more of a challenge.
There are these little plastic bits that you have to squeeze together and then pull.
That's not too bad, but there are seven of them and several of those seven are in really
tough to reach spots.
Once you do get them all squeezed down the entire front of the case just lifts off, and
around back here you can see each of those
seven plastic tabs that you have to squeeze together.
The ones towards the middle and the bottom were the ones that were hardest to reach because
they were actually underneath the cage that holds the drive bays.
That was just a pain.
Oh well, it worked and I was able to source a replacement hard disk panel right here on the right.
But as you can see it is a slightly different color than the rest of the front of the case
and this was the largest reason that I wanted to try and get the rest of it to kind of match
that replacement panel.
Which means it's RetroBright to the rescue!
And by that I mean some of this 40 volume clear developer stuff.
Basically hair bleach, and I’m just gonna pour that into some hot water and then submerge
the parts and leave them out in the sun for about combined total of 12 hours is actually
what I ended up doing.
About six hours over the course of two days.
And after all that it lightened up a good amount.
I didn’t want to completely bleach this, I wasn't trying to get it white.
These PS/2s were always kind of an off-white beige.
And then comparing it up against that hard disk panel and well, it's still not exactly
the same color temperature.
It's better though and that's all I was hoping for.
Really it's just gonna be a little bit different anyway because there were a lot of slight
variances in the way that these PS/2s came out.
Like I have 9 or 10 of these things and each one of them is a slightly different color temperature.
Oh well though, just putting the panels back in place and yeah, I'm pretty pleased with
how this came out.
It's certainly less distracting than it was to my eye so whatever, as long as it looks
alright I can deal with that.
And after a couple weeks the hard disk that I ordered for it showed up!
This is a WDL-330R 30 megabyte model.
It's not the original 20 megabyte one that I think came with this machine, but this was
available later on from IBM for the Model 30 so it works in my mind.
As you can see on the bottom it has the rails to slide into place and around back is the
very wide ESDI edge connector.
Unfortunately, I was not able to find the cable that
was needed to plug this thing into the motherboard.
This larger header over here on the right is where the drive would plug in with a ribbon
cable but the cables I ordered ended up being these MFM-compatible cables, even though they
were described otherwise.
I was striking out for weeks trying to find a Model 30-compatible hard disk cable with
that wide edge connector on one end and a 44-pin IDC connection on the other.
Oh well, let's go ahead and get the floppy disk drive installed once again, that just
slides back into place and clips there and we’ll get the cable connected.
And then the hard disk will slide right into place right next to it
minus the cables required, dang it.
And then the front face plates will just clip right back into place there.
Looking all nice and tidy with that hard disk assembly and yeah man, it's looking pretty good.
Just really bums me out how tricky it's proving to be to find the proper cable with the proper
connectors and the correct length and everything, ugh.
So in lieu of being able to get that properly set up let's do something fun!
This is the LGR AdLib sound card clone.
Obviously this is not original to the machine and it did not have a sound card, just that
little PC speaker in the bottom right corner there.
But I figured why not do something to test some things out because I’ve got computer
restoration blue balls with that elusive hard drive cable situation.
And we'll just get the rest of the case put back on there and there we go!
I'd say this Model 30 came together rather nicely, I'm glad that I got the rest of the case bleached.
It matches pretty closely at this point, not perfect.
And the bottom right still unfortunately has that little scratched off area where somebody
tore into the serial number.
But compared to how it was beforehand I mean, I think this looks pretty fantastic.
When we started it had marker and tape and goo and grime and all sorts of nastiness.
And now, ahhh!
Look at that fresh looking Model 30, for the most part!
We'll just ignore that hard drive for the time being.
Besides it's not gonna stop me from playing games because you can indeed boot DOS and
play a number of games directly from floppy disks.
I'm gonna try out Sierra’s Silpheed right here because it not only runs in MCGA, which
is the native graphics mode of this machine, but it also supports the AdLib sound card
and will run directly off of floppy disks and is fine with an 8086 processor.
So enjoy a bit of Silpheed here playing on the mostly-restored Model 30!
[Silpheed theme music plays in AdLib mode]
[PC speaker sounds and AdLib music triumphantly plays]
Yeah man, it's good stuff.
And to my great pleasure it runs rather well, all things considered, on this 8086 CPU.
Certainly better than on an IBM PC or XT with its 4.77 megahertz 8088.
Totally playable and it sounds pretty friggin good with that AdLib card.
Anyway, that was just for a bit of fun, I'm not gonna keep that AdLib card in there because
it's not original to the machine and I wasn't trying to soup this thing up or anything like that.
Because again, I do want to use this in a video that I'm gonna be putting together on
the IBM Personal System/2 line.
To that effect though I do want to answer the question as to why don't I just put another
hard disk interface in here since I can't find the correct cable for this one right now.
Well again, it's due to the power supply situation because if you remember: the motherboard sends
power through the ribbon cable, so that's why I'm not plugging in a hard disk controller
card or a flash memory adapter because without power I'm still out of luck.
I could use an alternate power supply or rig up my own cable or adapter to draw power from
the pins on the motherboard, and there are also devices like the XT-CF-Lite that would
let me install a Compact Flash card as a hard drive that draws power from an ISA slot.
So I do have options but I'm still going to be looking for the original cable since my
goal with this is to get this as close to factory fresh as possible for my upcoming
retrospective videos.
If you're curious the exact cable I'm looking for is IBM part number 61X8903.
I think.
It turns out there's a lot of misinformation online about the Model 30 hard drive interface
and the exact drives it can use.
Turns out this one doesn't utilize ESDI at all and instead it's a proprietary 8-bit IDE-like
interface that IBM used in order to get on my nerves 30 years later.
So yeah, after all that, I probably don't have the right hard drive for this revision
of the Model 30 but hey: live and learn.
If I'm lucky I'll have already figured things out by the time you're watching this.
But if not it's no big deal since the rest is working perfectly fine for what I have planned.
So I hope that you enjoyed this restoration episode, and stay tuned for the follow-up
in the future where we'll be taking a closer, more historical look at the Personal System/2
line -- specifically these lower-end offerings, the Model 30 and 25.
And if you can't wait then I've got plenty more along these lines uploaded already with
more stuff popping up every Monday and Friday here on LGR.
And as always, thank you very much for watching!