Micro-Channel Quadra 950 Liberated for $19.99 . . .

What are you going to do with the guts of the Model 80 then (motherboard, PS, cards, drives, proprietary floppy)?

I have 2 working and restored model 80's, both with 486 upgrades (one is a PS/2 card with a 486 and the other is a CPU board that snaps into the 386 socket). Real nice machines, and fully stuffed with MCA cards plsu both have IBM WORM drives (130MB 5.25" hard cased opticals).

There are 2 funky RAM cards in a model 80 under the power supply. They have something like a PDS slot to connect to the motherboard and the RAM is in rows and columns of square metals cans soldered to the board (1,2,4MB max per card). Any other RAM would be on MCA cards and use either 30 pin SIMMs (3rd party boards Orchid made one) or 72 pin SIMMs (IBM made boards). If the CMOS battery (large 6V camera type battery) is low or dead then the machine will have booting issues but the hardware might still be 100% ok. If so you will need a MCA setup floppy to boot from and driver files for all cards installed.

08064 KB OK

162

 

163

_

Flashing underscore, two BEEPS & then NADA!

Any clue?

Dead battery is all.

162 => CMOS checksum error or adapter ID mismatch (Hardware configuration does not match saved information.)

163 => Date and time not set.

There could be more RAM in there but it will not show up without the machine being setup correctly and that means a reference disk and a working battery.

http://mypage.intergate.ca/~fspencer/8580prob.htm <== link shows the battery type you can replace it with.

http://www.walshcomptech.com/selectpccbbs/rf7080a.zip <== Reference disk for a normal Model 80.

http://www.walshcomptech.com/selectpccbbs/rf80plan.zip <== Reference disk for a Model 80 with a Reply motherboard.

I think this one is ALL IBM!

It has 2 FDDs . . .

2 Memory Cards above the HDD frame/below the PSU . . .

an IBM 72 pin SIMM card in Slot 1 . . .

Slot 7 has what appears to be an IBM SCSI Card connected to 2 STUCKtion (sticktion to the MAX!) afflicted 1/2 height HDDs in an adapter frame . . .

Slot 6 has what appears to be a heavy duty Double VGA Card (with what appears to be lots of VRAM on the full length Daughter Card) which mirrors the same info as on the MoBo VGA Port . . .

The front HDD Bay is empty and there's a missing cover plate on Slot 4, the balance of the Slots being covered by blanks.

Methinks the original Full Height 5.25" Boot Drive & its Interface Card may be AWOL.

Dunno, were these monsters smart enough not to spin up the HDDs until after they passed the POST(?) Tests?

I'll try to find a battery and give it another shot! :approve:

Wow. I had one of those years ago but never found a use for it so it found another home.

Think it has 30pin RAM with the original FH 5.25" 40MB drive. Nothing else as interesting as yours though from what I remember. It apparently ran for years without any problem until the company upgraded.

Nice find!

Once you configure the cards AND point the system to the boot drive it might boot. Pictures would be interesting if you have time (especially of the video card you mentioned).

Some model 80's came with hard to find ESDI drives (pre SCSI types).

That is a tank. Nice find.

It sure is a tank, you've just gotta love a 40 lb. computer with a full length fold away handle and swivel feets! :approve:

I'll definitely be documenting this beast, but first I've gotta set up my compressor to blow about an eigth of an inch worth of dust off of EVERYTHING inside the case.

I literally had to wipe the dust off to be able to read ANYTHING on the cards. 8-o

The one thing I hate about those towers is the black weatherstripping by the blower fan (on the door panel) turns to a black sticky tar when it ages and gets over everything.

The one thing I hate about those towers is the black weatherstripping by the blower fan (on the door panel) turns to a black sticky tar when it ages and gets over everything.

Click to expand...

The gasket between the two metal halves of the case on old Conner laptop drives sometimes turns to goo, leaving a big mess in the laptop and a (relatively speaking) big gap between the case halves. I haven't taken one apart to see if the goo ends up on the platters as well.

We're talking ca. 1991 drives here, with 60 MB of capacity and IDE interface. CP2064. They were used in Outbound laptops, or, at least, they're compatible with Outbound Laptops. Good replacements for the old PrairieTek drives if the gasket hasn't turned to goo.

Speaking of goo and laptops, seems like all the rubber feet and other rubber parts on old NEC Versa laptops turn into a grey goo as well.

I got some pics, I just have to transfer them from HP_Mini to the DA to tweak 'em in GraphicConverter for posting.

I haven't got the hang of using the GIMP yet, but I'm'a gettin' thar! }

Pics are up . . . whatcha think? Is that Cyrix Proc a '486 upgrade? :?:

Belly-o-da-BEAST



heart-o-da-BEAST



SCSI-or-ESDI_0



SCSI-or-ESDI_1



Memory-n-SCSI-or-ESDI_Card?





VGA/DaughterCard





Sorry about the load time, it's late and . . . zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz |)

IBM 8514/A video card

Normal SCSI card (they have others with cache or wide)

Cyrix CPU is interesting, can you get a picture of the chip by sliding out that metal tray?

I'm guessing the Cyrix chip is a Cx486DRx2 upgrade CPU. Those were strange hybrid chips that fit a 386 socket and lacked an onboard math coprocessor but had a small 1k onboard cache and understood the 486 instruction set. (Making them neither fish nor fowl, really.) The 8580-111 ran at 16 Mhz so that CPU probably clock doubles it to 32Mhz.

Sadly that's probably rare enough to count as a collector's item, assuming you could find the right crazy chip collector to sell it to.

That was my guess, I remember lots of silly '486 upgrades from back in the day! )

Looking at this find of yours I have to say I'd be torn what to do with it.

On one hand I want to say that it would really be a pity to gut/part out a PS/2 Model 80 like this since it's one of the first ones. (The 16Mhz models were the first 80386 produced by IBM, just beaten to market by the Compaq Deskpro.) Although the upgrade CPU sort of kills it so far as being a pristine "museum piece" in compensation it does have one of the rarer bits that would make it a marginally useful machine today (assuming you actually want a DOS or slow OS/2 machine for something), namely the SCSI card. Replacement MFM/ESDI drives for PS/2s are unobtanium these days. (The absolute worst were the completely proprietary "it's sort of like ESDI and IDE had a mutant lovechild" drives they used in some of their smaller desktop machines like the otherwise beautiful Model 55sx.)

On the other hand it's a huge hulking slug-slow beast that's getting pretty darn hard to find other parts for and if you lack the interest to dig into it for its own sake it's pretty much a huge, boring, if somewhat historically interesting paperweight. IBM did sell a lot of these things so they can't be *that* rare... can they?

Might be worth trying to hawk it on eBay before you gut it. One side effect of the PS/2's neat modular design is it would be something of a challenge to hack anything else into it without seriously butchering the case. (Witness a young John Dvorak bad-temperedly ripping a PS/2 apart if you need some inspiration, however.)

I had that Cyrix Proc tagged for a DOS-Compatibility Card test . . . }

Me showing my ignorance here, but... did any Apple-branded DOS compatibility cards come with less than a 486? That Cyrix CPU will *not* (capital N-O-T) work in a 486 socket. Has about half the right number of pins to start with...

I'm sure there were third-party 386-based cards, granted.

As far as I know Apple released the first DOS card on the 6100 DOS compatible (486) then did a PCI Powermac Pentium 166 verion and thats it.

Dunno, I was thinking the DOS Compatibility Card for my Q630/P6360 (form factor, don't remember which, don't even know if I still have it or not) might have been a '386 . . .

. . . but, apparently not. IIRC, I've got a doubled-up '286 NuBus Card somewhere, but it might have gone down the whirlpool too.

Such is life! :-/ < sigh >

Did I mention that the SCSI Card has what appears to be a Fast/Wide SCSI II connector sticking out of the Backplane? Could it be connected to the two HDDs as a pair of Fast SCSI II Drives in a RAID Config? Otherwise, it makes no sense to me whatsoever, to have SCSI II hanging out the back, without implementing it somehow on the inside of the box.

Dunno, strange beast, I have no real desire to play around with any cockamamy system with HDDs in it that STILL requires a setup FDD to be accessed to even begin to function. Sounds like IBM had their collective heads farther up their digestive tract than even Apple managed at its very worst . . .

. . . and THAT'S goin' a fer piece! 8-o

It's always funny to see the huge old computers in ads and photos online, and then see pictures of the fairly minuscule chips that went into them. That is definitely a pretty awesome haul though, especially if you have the keyboard, monitor and mouse for it, or at least a set that matches it with some amount of accuracy. Put it next to your desk and go "What? This is a hard-core person's computer."

Or not.

If you happen to have a whole set up, photos of it put up somewhere would be pretty fun. Especially if you've got a comparable Quadra 950 to put it near. [] ]'>

That SCSI jack hanging out the back is probably a propreitary IBM SCSI-1 port plug, you will need a special cable to use external drives.

Don't assume the drives have sticktion just because they're not spinning. They don't start until the controller tells them to, and you're not far along enough yet in the boot process for that to have happened.

Of course, they could still be stuck. But I doubt it.

BTW the 8514/A outputs 256 colors at 1024x768 30Hz interlaced. You may have trouble finding a monitor that will sync to that.

Did I mention that the SCSI Card has what appears to be a Fast/Wide SCSI II connector sticking out of the Backplane? Could it be connected to the two HDDs as a pair of Fast SCSI II Drives in a RAID Config? Otherwise, it makes no sense to me whatsoever, to have SCSI II hanging out the back, without implementing it somehow on the inside of the box.

Click to expand...

Apparently early IBM SCSI cards used a proprietary 60-to-50-pin adapter cable on their external connector. It's apparently the same connector IBM UNIX machines like the PC RT and RS/6000 used. Which is annoying, but in all fairness Apple's 25 pin DIN connector was not only proprietary (until other manufacturers copied it) but was electrically bad.

Dunno, strange beast, I have no real desire to play around with any cockamamy system with HDDs in it that STILL requires a setup FDD to be accessed to even begin to function. Sounds like IBM had their collective heads farther up their digestive tract than even Apple managed at its very worst . . .

Click to expand...

In context the "Reference Disk" system made perfect sense. The Microchannel bus system allowed far more latitude for reconfiguring the layout of the system than PC AT clones did. (Or Nubus, for that matter. There were, for instance, RAM cards for the 80286 models that could remap or completely disable memory on the Planer in order to add an LIM/EMS 4.0 MMU.) Microchannel bus cards all came with a floppy that described what system resource changes they needed to function, and that data would be read by the setup program which would arbitrate resource requests from all the cards and come up with a working configuration to stuff into the nonvolatile RAM and allow said configuration to "just work" at boot time without having to re-detect everything. (In addition, the resource files for the individual cards would be copied to the main Reference disk so you wouldn't need to keep track of all the individual ones. Should the nonvolatile RAM contents be lost you could just boot the one disk and set the system back the way it was in pretty much one step.)

It certainly would of been possible to put the entire setup program in ROM and read the configuration databases off of ROMs in the installed cards, but IBM's system had some advantages, namely being cheaper and *potentially* more flexible. (For instance, Flash memory didn't really exist yet at the time, so using the Reference Disk system essentially allowed "BIOS updates" to recognize new hardware to happen without swapping chips.)

Eh, anyway. It seems stupid now, I guess, but we're also terribly spoiled by a quarter century of evolution.

BTW the 8514/A outputs 256 colors at 1024x768 30Hz interlaced. You may have trouble finding a monitor that will sync to that.

Click to expand...

It's actually 43.5Hz. (I know, nitpicky.) It's a "standard" resolution in the sense that it was moderately widespread back in the day, but... yeah, I haven't used a system that was only capable of that *forever* so I honestly have no idea how common support for it is in LCDs. Any Multisync CRT monitor shouldn't have a problem with it, though.

I snagged a decent VidCard for the Sendakian WildThing™ on the 'Bay recently.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/230814274578



Would a second 72 pin SIMM Memory Expansion Card be Beneficial?

Pics of the Proc have been on the to do list . . .

. . . for a while now! :lol:

What are you going to do with the guts of the Model 80 then (motherboard, PS, cards, drives, proprietary floppy)?
I have 2 working and restored model 80's, both with 486 upgrades (one is a PS/2 card with a 486 and the other is a CPU board that snaps into the 386 socket). Real nice machines, and fully stuffed with MCA cards plsu both have IBM WORM drives (130MB 5.25" hard cased opticals).

There are 2 funky RAM cards in a model 80 under the power supply. They have something like a PDS slot to connect to the motherboard and the RAM is in rows and columns of square metals cans soldered to the board (1,2,4MB max per card). Any other RAM would be on MCA cards and use either 30 pin SIMMs (3rd party boards Orchid made one) or 72 pin SIMMs (IBM made boards). If the CMOS battery (large 6V camera type battery) is low or dead then the machine will have booting issues but the hardware might still be 100% ok. If so you will need a MCA setup floppy to boot from and driver files for all cards installed.

Click to expand...

I may be setting this hulking beast (Wild Things don't look very fast) as a working system for giggles.

For the shiznits part of the equation, I'm thinking about setting up my ATOM NetTop board behind the 5.25" Cover plate with an ATX PSU. The only mod to the internals will be drilling out the spot welds attaching the front drive bracket to the HDD Chassis and bolting the NetTop chassis up to the tapped holes. I'm thinking in terms of a swing-out Smoked Plexi cover plate replacement that'll match the panels on the Commodore 64 WorkStation I made back in the day, with a peripherals & Card Reader breakout box in it, maybe a vertically mounted portable USB type DVD behind the short section of a reversed 5.25" bezel?

I'm looking for excuses to put the CD-SC back together un-molested, possibly repaired, and build the largest, most redonckulous, hackintosh on the planet . . .

. . . with a Cyrix powered co-processor board . . . [}] ]'>

iCrap!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I re-installed the cards, hookied it up to monitor & KBD, flipped the switch and . . . nada!

Tried it a few more times, I hear two tink tinks coming from the PSU when I flip the switch.

No side panel installed, it booted to the setup floppy search when I first got it.

Suggestions?

Cool box, too bad you're having problems with it. I threw one of those away a while back, saved some of the pieces though. I think I have the RAM card and a SCSI card.. might find a use for it someday. I did also get a (very loud) 2GB 50 pin SCSI drive out of it too.

I have a PS/2 Model 80 with one giant MFM drive in it and internal 3.5" and 5.25" drives. When turned on it does nothing except the hard drive spins up and the speaker clicks as if power was applied and made it there, but no beeps and no disk drive activity. Nothing on the Sony Trinitron monitor that I attached.

Have you checked your power supply voltages with the motherboard attached (as a load)?