At the dawn of October 1988, the IBM PS/2 was looking like a success. As it closed out its third quarter of 1988, IBM announced the PS/2 had sold 3 million units in its first year and a half on the market. The pace of 2 million units a year made it one of the best-selling machines in the world at the time. But it ultimately proved to be IBM’s downfall in the PC market. So it’s historically significant, however you feel about IBM. But should you buy an IBM PS/2? Is an IBM PS/2 a good retro computer?
Is an IBM PS/2 a good retro computer?
The IBM PS/2 has some significant upsides compared to the PC series it replaced. The desktop-model PS/2s are much smaller and lighter than an IBM 5150, 5160, or 5170. They will plug straight into a VGA monitor, so whether you want to use a CRT or an LCD with it, you can find a usable display rather easily. The VGA monitors for the PS/2 are easier to find than the first-generation IBM monitors.
And if you get a Model 25, the monitor is built right into the unit.
If your PS/2 doesn’t come with the keyboard, you have options. You can probably get a modern-ish PS/2 keyboard at your nearest thrift store for less than $10 while you look for an IBM Model M. While Model Ms are expensive, they are less expensive than an XT keyboard for an IBM 5150 or 5160.
A PS/2 Model 30 makes for a reasonably good late 1980s retro PC. It has three ISA slots, so you can install a sound card, XTIDE adapter, and a network card, and run any VGA or EGA software that doesn’t require a faster CPU than the 8 MHz 8086 or 10 MHz 286 processor in your Model 30.
There are better options for a retro PC from that era, but that’s not to say a Model 30 is either a terrible or unworkable option.
Things get trickier when you want a faster processor than what you could get in a Model 30. Once you get past the Model 30 and Model 30-286, you have to deal with Microchannel.
Pros and cons of higher-end IBM PS/2s
There’s a fair bit of appeal in a PS/2 Model 50Z, a Model 70, or the towering Model 80. These get you into faster processors and higher memory capacity than the entry-level Model 25 or Model 30. The hidden cost with those is the requirement for Microchannel expansion cards. For example, to put a PS/2 on your local network so you can load software onto it more easily, you’d want an Ethernet adapter. You can get a Microchannel Ethernet adapter, but you will pay considerably more for it than you will pay for an ISA Ethernet adapter. You’ll need to make sure you can find drivers for it for whatever operating system you want to use with it. And then to set it up, you have to mess with reference disks.
Even if you don’t need an Ethernet card, you will eventually need some type of a disk controller. PS/2s did not have IDE on the motherboard. Modern Microchannel IDE adapters do exist and would probably be the easiest and most cost effective option at this point. If your PS/2 has a hard drive, it’s probably not terribly fast, and it’s not getting any younger.
Dealing with Microchannel
To configure a Microchannel card, you boot the machine off its reference disk. Then you insert the reference disk for the expansion card you installed. The system configures itself automatically, and that is a considerable improvement over contemporary ISA cards which could have large numbers of jumpers or DIP switches you had to set correctly to get the cards to work. It really was the predecessor to Plug and Play, and as long as you had the disks and the disks didn’t have any faults on them, it worked better than the early days of Plug and Play did.
But if your floppy drive and your disks are not in perfect working order, Microchannel can be a bit of a liability.
At my first IT job, where we still had a number of PS/2s in service, all three of us who worked on them had a disk file with a near complete set of reference disks for each PS/2 system and each Microchannel card that we might encounter.
Today you can get the images, probably just as easily or maybe even more easily than I could get them in the mid ’90s. But the disk drives present a bit of a problem.
Dealing with IBM PS/2 floppy drives
Most IBM PS/2s used a different pinout then the rest of the industry, so you need an adapter to use a cheap and common 1.44 megabyte floppy drive to replace a worn out or malfunctioning PS/2 drive. The distinctive faceplate on the PS/2 also presents a challenge, since the parts on a modern drive mechanism typically won’t line up. You can get a 3D printed faceplate with an opening for a modern drive. It doesn’t completely look the part, but restores needed functionality.
I would use a Gotek so I don’t have to deal with aging magnetic media. It will look a bit anachronistic, but for me the convenience would be worth it.
What about sound?
Sound is yet another issue. Presumably, if you want a 386, you want to enjoy some late ’80s or early ’90s titles that featured OPL 2 or OPL 3 sound. Microchannel sound cards existed, but if you think the price of early Sound Blaster and Ad Lib sound cards is out of hand, the price of Microchannel sound cards is in another league. And very few of them were produced, so even if you have a hefty budget, it may take you a while to find one. I’ve seen Microchannel sound cards, but it was more than 25 years ago.
There is a modern Microchannel sound card available, and that’s probably going to be your best option. It will cost more than a comparable Sound Blaster or similar card, but at least you can get one.
Another option for PS/2s is to use a sound card that plugs into the parallel port. On machines with limited numbers of expansion slots, you may have to go this route anyway. You’ll have to move things around to use a printer, but that’s probably workable.
You’ll have to decide if it’s worth it
If the experience of owning and using a PS/2 sounds like the IBM 5170 experience on steroids, that’s about right. With the 5170, anytime you make a change to the system, you have to boot off a setup disk, or a DOS boot disk containing a third party setup utility like GSETUP, and then navigate a not terribly friendly user interface to configure the system. The PS/2 is a lot like that, except you need more disks, and there’s no third party utility to make things a bit friendlier than the IBM original.
And while the PS/2 machines themselves are pretty reasonably priced for machines of their vintage, finding the parts you need to turn them into a dream machine quickly turns into a costly and challenging endeavor. The more period correct you want it to be, the more challenging and time consuming it becomes.
If you just want an old machine to use, you’re probably better off buying pretty much anything else. If you have a soft spot for IBM, a PS/1 machine would be a much easier bet.
The challenge
But for some hobbyists, the challenge is part of the fun. Tracking down a machine and then tracking down the hardware to turn it into what you want can be fun. For some people that’s the best part. The challenge of getting it all working can be fun. For others, that’s the best part. For a lot of vintage computer hobbyists, space quickly becomes an issue because of the temptation to just buy everything you find. You buy a machine, spend a few weeks getting it working just the way you like it, maybe spend a few more weeks really enjoying that system, but then you either get the urge to start a new project, or a new project finds you.
A PS/2 project will keep you in the hunt much longer than a clone PC project would. And then in the end, you have something noticeably different from the typical late ’80s or early 90s PC clone. We call them clones for a reason.
So is the IBM PS/2 a good retro computer? Should you buy an IBM PS/2? Only you can decide. It’s a pretty safe bet that the IBM PS/2 is either your idea of the ultimate retro PC or the nightmare retro PC. But that’s for you to decide, and there is no right or wrong answer. It’s also possible that the answer can change depending on where you are in life.
And that’s okay too. The PS/2 is a historically significant PC. But IBM found out the hard way it wasn’t for everyone in the late 80s and early ’90s either.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
Shared to our Facebook and ‘CSIPH’ (comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware) newsgroup. I highly recommend the ‘Ardent-Tool’ website for anyone that ‘happens’ into a PS/2, with even a quick visual guide to identify the different models, information, and diagrams to get started. We welcome new members into the community – as the IBM mug says, “PS/2 It!”.
Thank you for that, I was wondering where all that traffic came from! The Ardent Tool website is at https://www.ardent-tool.com/systems/ps2.html and yes, it’s a spectacular resource.
Another helpful resource for PS/2s – since it has been about 35 years from when they were new – is a ‘parallel port POST code reader’: All PS/2s have a parallel port to send POST codes to (no adapter needed), and it can help when the system doesn’t display any video or have beep codes. Available for less than $10 USD total on eBay.