IBM's 386 Tower of Power: The PS/2 Model 80

Stand aside. This is a large computer and it takes large steps. Yes, it’s IBM’s biggest, baddest, and heaviest computer of 1987: The PS/2 Model 80 386. If one of these behemoths lumbers into your collection you need to be prepared for all the gotchas it brings. Here in Userlandia we’re adopting a Micro Channel mammoth.

Oh, Micro Channel Architecture. I sure talked a lot about you in the PS/2 Model 30 286 Computers of Significant History video. I had to, really, because a lack of Micro Channel was a defining trait of that PC. To understand what that machine had meant looking at what it lacked. But as I wrote the script, I realized I had a problem: I didn’t own a Micro Channel PS/2. What was I going to use for video footage?

My original strategy was to use still photos and archive footage from my various VCF trips for coverage. I had no plans to buy a Micro Channel machine due to expensive eBay listings and high shipping fees. But I’ve always wanted an MCA PS/2 in my collection, and if I had an opportunity to get one at a good price I’d take it. And wouldn’t you know it, just as I was polishing up the script an alert popped up on my local Craigslist for a working PS/2 Model 80. The machine appeared to be in great shape, with a working SCSI hard drive and a memory expansion card. $200 wasn’t an awful price either. The odds of finding a better deal elsewhere—especially for a machine in this condition—were pretty low. After an hour of hemming and hawing I finally emailed an offer to buy it.

Craigslist Ad for Model 80

Buying stuff on Craigslist or Marketplace can be an adventure, and this was one of the better ones. The PS/2 was located in Townsend, Massachusetts, a bucolic New England town forty-five minutes away from me. I met up with Aaron, who’s a technician at a computer shop. This Model 80 was one of his vintage restoration projects. He cleaned it from top to bottom, fixed a blown tantalum capacitor, and replaced the 6V CMOS battery. We had a great conversation about old computers and his cool Dodge Daytona. I handed him two hundred bucks, he handed me a pack of setup floppies, and I drove this beast home.

I’ll give Aaron extra credit for the effort he put into this machine before selling it. We’ve all been there with people demanding ridiculous sums for something that’s been in a basement for twenty years because they know what they have. A little spit shine and TLC go a long way when making a deal, and as a buyer I try to respond in kind. I don’t want to waste my time or yours, and I’m willing to show up with cash in hand for a sensible price and a good experience.

Aaron’s efforts also made this computer camera ready. The exterior looks like it's fresh out of a detailer. All the icky black foam’s been plucked from the side panel. And look at all these clean, shiny boards! The Model 80 was also mechanically ready and fully configured thanks to a new CMOS battery, a working floppy drive, and a fresh reference disk. When I flipped the power switch the machine booted right to MS-DOS, with some games and a copy of Windows ready to roll. A turnkey experience like this is a rarity in retro these days. Accounting for the value of this work in the price tag makes this a veritable bargain compared to the ones I’ve seen on eBay.

But let’s say you’re not as lucky and you stumble upon a PS/2 that needs some work. A Micro Channel machine can bamboozle seasoned vintage computer collectors with the myriad ways it differs from a regular PC. So I’m going to explore how these machines are built, what they’re capable of, how to upgrade and configure them, and the bumps you’ll hit along the way. I’ve got plenty of knowledge from books and past encounters with PS/2s, but there’s bound to be gaps in my memory. I’d also need resources like disk images, drivers, and ADFs. Luckily, I can stand on the shoulders of big blue giants like The Ardent Tool of Capitalism and IBM Museum. They’re a treasure trove of downloads, documentation, and answers to oddly specific questions. Now that you have an idea of where we’re going, let’s start by exploring the Model 80’s case.

Tower cases were still a rarity back in 1987, and IBM chose to rotate the case 90 degrees because… well, look at the size of this thing! The Models 60 and 80 were designed as floor standing towers that live underneath a desk. Yet despite considerable height and depth it’s fairly narrow compared to most tower cases. IBM was so enthralled with 3.5 inch drives that they designed the enclosure around them. Still, there is a full-height 5 1/4 inch bay—it’s just rotated 90 degrees to fit.

But a big case has a cost, and the price you pay is weight. It’s so heavy that there’s a sticker listing its weight at 40.5 pounds. And this isn’t even the heaviest Model 80 variant! Perhaps IBM took pity on the people who had to port these machines around, because they included a handy handle on the top of the case. I suppose that makes it portable in some way, but I think “liftable” is the better term.

On the bottom of the case are two fold-out pedestal feet. Because the case was intended to stand underneath a desk, there’s a risk that the tower would tip over after an accidental kick from a desk jockey. The cases’s tall, skinny design combined with a top-mounted power supply and heavy drives gives it a high center of gravity. Instead of making the whole case wider—or perhaps as a consequence of designing the narrowest case possible—IBM added these feet to balance things out. You don’t have to use them, but you probably should.

For connectivity, the Model 80 offers a standard array of ports: keyboard, mouse, serial, parallel, and VGA. This makes it easy to hook this old boat anchor up to modern-ish displays and input devices.

Finally, the pièce de résistance: the power switch. IBM may have changed the color from red to white, but it still has that trademark chunky sound. Mmm, satisfying.

Now let’s take a look inside. The side panel is secured by two captive screws, and a coin is the perfect tool to loosen them. There’s a key lock too, but this case’s keys are lost to time. If it was locked, all it takes to open it is cutting the end off a Bic pen and shoving it in.

Normally this panel would be covered in a black noise dampening foam, which over time decomposes into an awful black goo. It’s sticky and gross and irritating and it gets everywhere. Thankfully Aaron removed it all during his restoration. If you’re buying a Model 60 or 80, be prepared for a full de-lousing.

Once you look inside you’ll understand why this computer is so capacious: this case corrals clusters of cards, cages and cables. IBM built this machine to grow along with its customers, and that meant a lot of space for said customers to cram in expensive IBM components. It’s not too chaotic for an enclosure of its era, all things considered. There’s even some basic cable management features.

Storage accounts for most of the volume. The Models 60 and 80 offer “up to six direct storage access bays,” but what does that mean, exactly? That figure includes two externally accessible 3.5 inch bays, one of which is fitted with a 1.4MB floppy drive from the factory. The second bay was free for you to install a second floppy drive, a tape drive, or nowadays a Gotek.

Next is a full-height 5 1/4 inch drive bay. It could hold a floppy drive, optical drive, or a massive full-height hard disk. Installing a drive is straightforward—attach some AT drive rails, slide it in, and tighten the clamp using these thumbscrews. Good luck finding a bezel for most drives, though. Later Model 80s ditched full-height hard drives for a dual drive bracket. Buy a second one and—ta-da—you now have the advertised maximum of six drive bays.

A lot of drives will draw a lot of power, and a 242 watt power supply feeds all these components. That might not seem like much compared to modern workstations, but it was pretty good for its day. PC ATs maxed out at 192 watts, while desktop PS/2s offered something between 90 and 132 watts. All this juice flowed through fully modular cables, which was another rarity for the era.

What if you needed to replace a dead drive or a faulty power supply? Taking apart these towers is easier than you’d expect because they were designed to be serviced on site by corporate IT techs. The first step is to remove the front bezel. It comes off with a solid pull from the bottom, just like many modern PCs. The 3.5 inch bay covers are held in with clips and pop out easily by pushing in at the edge, and the same goes for the 5 1/4 bay bezel.

Like other PS/2s the floppy drives are attached to sleds. Unplug the floppy cable, press upwards on the tabs, and it slides right out of the case. Next is the hard drive bracket. This is easy—just loosen the thumbscrews and the bracket slides back for removal. Hard drives are installed using standard drive screws. Four screws secure the drive bay carrier to the chassis. Use a nut driver or a big flathead screwdriver to loosen them. Once the screws are removed, the bay carrier lifts up and out of the case. The power supply is just as easy. First, unplug the motherboard cable. Then unscrew the three screws securing the power supply to the chassis. Now you can grab this handle and pull up.

With all those components removed we’re left with a sizable motherboard. IBM made three different versions of the Model 80 planar, and this one’s a type 2. It’s distinguished by two ROM BIOS chips versus the type 1’s four chips, and three 32-bit MCA slots versus the type 3’s four slots. Google the FRU number if you’re unsure.

Processing power comes from a 20MHz 386DX CPU and 387DX FPU. There’s no cache on this board; that was reserved for the 25MHz type 3.

Memory for the Model 80 comes in the form of these planar memory cards. IBM shipped these -081s with one 2MB card, and this example has a second 2MB card bringing the total to 4MB. Up to 8MB could be installed on this planar via two 4MB memory cards. Finding them isn’t easy, so you might have better luck installing Micro Channel RAM expansion boards.

Here’s a neat curiosity: an add-on floppy controller plugged into the planar’s floppy port. I haven’t been able to identify this specific board or find any documentation for it, but based on the jumpers my hunch is that it came with a tape backup kit. Attached to its secondary port is a long ribbon cable that leads to a slot bracket with a 37 pin external floppy connector. Presumably this would work with the IBM External 5 1/4 inch drive, but I don’t have one to test this theory. I’m also curious if it supports more than two floppy drives, as the standard dual-drive ribbon cable is still attached to the primary port. If you have any ideas, leave me a note.

Video is provided by IBM’s base PS/2 VGA graphics chipset. A VGA controller, 256K of video memory, and an Inmos RAMDAC deliver standard VGA graphics modes like 320x200 at 256 colors.

Unlike my Model 30 and its Dallas clock chip, the Model 80 has a separate battery for its realtime clock and CMOS memory. It’s a common 6V lithium camera battery that costs around ten to fifteen bucks to replace. These machines won’t boot without a working battery, so make sure to put one on your shopping list.

Lastly, it’s time for slots and cards. Micro Channel Architecture is the defining feature of these PS/2s, and you’ll need to learn its intricacies before planning any upgrades. This Model 80 came with three cards: an IBM Token Ring Adapter, an IBM PS/2 SCSI Adapter, and an IBM Enhanced 32-bit Memory Adapter.

Before adding or removing any cards I suggest you make a note of your existing configuration. Adding, removing, or changing cards will force you to run the reference disk’s configuration utility at the next boot. I’ve got the memory card in slot 2, SCSI card in slot 4, and token ring card in slot 7.

Installing Micro Channel cards is pretty easy. Unlike ISA and PCI cards which are secured by regular screws inside the case, MCA cards are secured by thumbscrews that are outside the case. I find them a bit fiddly for my fingers, but the ends are slotted so a screwdriver or coin makes quick work of loosening them. Then each card can be lifted up and out of the case thanks to these plastic guide pieces.

Another difference between MCA and other types of cards is the bracket. One of the reported flaws of the classic card bracket is that it’s not great at stopping electromagnetic leakage. Micro Channel brackets are designed to slide into, well, metal channels forged in the back of the case. A set of springy fingers on each side of the bracket grip the channel sidewalls and connects a solid ground.

With all the cards removed we can see three different types of MCA slots. This planar has three 32-bit slots with matched memory extension, four standard 16-bit slots, and one 16-bit slot with Auxiliary Video Extension. Notice that despite their varying lengths that all the slots are aligned to this one key pin. A 32-bit slot has a longer connector than a 16-bit slot, but since the key pin is in the same location, a 16-bit card works in a 32-bit slot. Some 32-bit cards can be used in 16 bit slots if they have a compatibility key—just make sure the hanging edge connector doesn’t interfere with other components.

Extensions aren’t just for bit width, either. Check out this one on the front of slot 6: it’s the Auxiliary Video Extension, yet another evolutionary dead-end for PC graphics. Imagine you’re buying a PC to run CAD applications in the mid-1980s. Basic CGA and MDA graphics cards weren’t up to snuff, so you’d buy a dedicated graphics card and a matching monitor. But you can’t get rid of your original video card and monitor, because that expensive new card and monitor can’t display those old modes! So your original graphics card and monitor would live side-by-side with your new graphics card and monitor, usually with text on the former and graphics on the latter.

IBM’s fist attempt at solving this problem was the beast known as the Professional Graphics Controller, or Adapter, or Array. This triple-decker circuit board sandwich layered with chips and controllers served up analog RGB video at 640x480 resolution with 256 colors out of a palette of 4096. But that’s not all—it also emulated CGA graphics modes over the same analog output! This meant you could run Lotus 1-2-3 and AutoCAD on the same monitor without needing to flip switches or change inputs.

So when you look at the PGC and its layers of complexity, you can see the logic behind the AVE. If IBM was already including a VGA chipset on every PS/2 motherboard, why not use it? Installing an AVE card trips a presence switch that enables a digital passthrough for the onboard VGA graphics. Whenever a CGA, EGA, or basic VGA mode is requested, the planar’s VGA is routed through the AVE to the add-in card’s monitor port. If you’re thinking “Wait a minute, that sounds suspiciously similar to how 3dfx cards passed through VGA signals from a 2D graphics card,” you’re not wrong! The execution’s different, but the spirit’s the same.

There’s nothing technically wrong with AVE, but it was doomed to fail. Partly because it was a Micro Channel exclusive and Micro Channel failed, but mostly because IBM underestimated the power of Moore’s law. Makers of graphics board took advantage of the rapid pace of technological advancement to soup up VGA into more powerful Super VGA cards that could display standard modes and their higher resolution modes without passthroughs. Even IBM had to admit it was a dead end when they integrated VGA support into XGA. But that’s enough about video for the moment. Let’s examine the cards that came with this system.

First and certainly least is a Token Ring 16/4 Network Adapter. IBM’s version of Token Ring is probably the most famous—or infamous—ring topology network. Setting up a simple Token Ring network isn’t easy, because an Access Unit is required for even the simplest scenario of connecting two computers together. Stay tuned, because I have a different solution for getting this machine on a network.

Next is the IBM PS/2 SCSI Adapter. It’s better known by its codename Tribble, as it’s one of two SCSI cards with Star Trek names. The other Star Trek SCSI card—Spock—has cache memory which, logically, should yield better performance. Model 80s won’t see much of a benefit from the cache, so a Tribble card is fine. A ribbon cable attaches to the top edge connector and provides three 50-pin connectors for internal drives. The external connection is, annoyingly, a proprietary IBM HDCN-60 pin connector. That means no external CD-ROM or Zip drives without finding a unicorn cable or adapter. At least an internal BlueSCSI can serve as a CD-ROM emulator.

Lastly, we have the IBM Enhanced 80386 Memory Adapter with ROM. This long board with the longer name is a great example of IBM’s penchant for proprietary peculiarities. Model 80 planars are limited to a maximum of 4 or 8 MB of on-board memory depending on your particular variant. Further memory expansion requires a Micro Channel memory expander from IBM or third parties like Intel, Kingston, and so on.

One downside to IBM memory adapters is that they require IBM-branded SIMMs. The system checks for presence bits on the SIMMs that match specific combinations of speed and size, and if it doesn’t find them it’ll error during POST. I bought a pair of IBM 4MB 70ns SIMMs because various sites and newsgroup posts claimed the part number was compatible. 70ns SIMMs should work in an 80ns system; they’ll just run at 80ns. Yet after I installed them the PS/2 returned an 18441 Unsupported SIMM error.

The seller had validated them as working IBM SIMMs, and I had no reason to doubt them because I’ve bought plenty of good RAM from them before. And yes, I tried it with only the 70ns SIMMs installed. Maybe 70ns SIMMs only work in this card when it’s installed in a type 3 planar, which requires 70ns RAM. I eventually gave up and bought two 80ns SIMMs that matched the one I already had, and those worked fine.

Now I have 16MB of RAM, which is great for DOS and Windows 3.1, and probably acceptable for OS/2. Coincidentally, 16MB is the soft limit for RAM in a Model 80. Yet another quirk of this machine is the 24-bit direct memory access controller, which means any DMA transfers must occur in the first 16 MB of RAM. If a bus-master card or an OS performs a DMA transfer above that barrier, well… brace yourself for a crash. That’s a bit of a bummer for a machine like the Model 80 which is designed around DMA and bus mastering.

But where there’s a will to install more RAM, there’s a way. IBM released the Bypass One Problem Temporarily patch, which updates the reference disk and the ROM on this card to work around the 16MB limit. The requirements for this are a bit arcane—you’ll need at least two MCA memory adapters, one of which has ROM. I highly recommend reading a copy of the update instructions posted by Ian Brown on the comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware newsgroup. I updated my adapter by following these instructions and the process was tedious but straightforward. Pro tip: save yourself from dozens of disk swaps and extract the updated ADFs and SC.EXE from a disk image and copy them to your reference disk using a modern PC. If this is too hacky for you, boards like the Acculogic and Kingston memory expanders have their own memory mappers and can break the 16MB barrier without BOPT according to PS/2 wizard Peter Wendt. My advice is to avoid this problem entirely and stick to the maximum 16MB of RAM.

Imagine that you’ve finished restoring a PS/2 just like this one. You’ve replaced the CMOS battery, upgraded the memory, serviced the drives, and stuffed all those cards into its slots. It’s be a big white doorstop unless you have the key to start it: the reference disk. Every MCA PS/2 has a Reference Disk with utilities and configuration files to set up its BIOS, and you’ll need to fish it out whenever hardware changes are made. Odds are it’s not the only disk you’ll need either thanks to the architecture of IBM’s software device configuration.

Plug and play systems need a way for the BIOS or operating system to identify hardware, and IBM’s idea was Programmable Option Select. POS uses eight hardware registers to declare the card’s identity and capabilities. The first two contain adapter and manufacturer information encoded into a unique 16-bit identifier. The next four are programmable option registers that use bit masks to define the card’s option settings. They’re like a software version of DIP switches or jumpers that let you virtually select configuration options like an IRQ or address port. The last two are subaddress registers which can read or write data to additional memory on the board. I’m glossing over a lot here, but if you want more gory details about MCA’s architecture I’d recommend checking out the sources I used for research: Tube Time’s MCA Tutorial or the MCA Architecture Handbook on Archive.org.

POS’ fatal flaw—unfortunate abbreviation aside—is that it doesn’t actually tell the BIOS much of anything about the card other than the unique ID. A few reserved option bits have fixed functions defined in the spec, but otherwise you’d have no idea what a card is capable of just by looking at the registers. That’s why every card needs a matching Adapter Description File. ADFs are text files which translate the unique ID into an actual card name and the option registers into settings like IRQs and I/O addresses. Without ADF files MCA cards are worthless. Back in the day these files came on Option floppies, or you could download them from a BBS and copy them to your reference diskette.

How does software configuration work in practice? Let’s demonstrate by trading out the Token Ring card for an Ethernet card; specifically this Western Digital EtherCard Plus 10T. After installing the card I’ll need to boot up with the reference disk.

God, the memory test on this is slow.

The system recognized that the adapter configuration has changed andI’m prompted to run automatic configuration. Normally this is when you’d use Copy Option Diskette to load the ADF, but I’ve already copied the ADF to the reference disk using a modern PC. The auto-configuration process takes a few minutes, and when it’s done you’re dropped into the reference disk’s main menu.

Looking in View Configuration the ethernet card shows up in slot 7 and we have some settings to tweak like its I/O resource, IRQ, BIOS ROM, and so on. This is POS working as designed, automatically selecting the appropriate resources based on the installed cards. Seems pretty easy, so why does everybody grouse about it?

It’s not that POS doesn’t work; it’s that it doesn’t go far enough for something that breaks backwards compatibility. POS might have eliminated jumpers and switches but it didn't solve the architectural issues that made them necessary in the first place. There’s still the potential for resource conflicts with an unlucky combination of cards. It doesn’t matter if the system can auto-assign an IRQ when the only one the card can select is 7. Then there’s the tedious reference and option disk shuffling, which nobody liked then or now. If my reference disk was lost or destroyed I’d have to re-copy all the ADFs and re-do all my custom configurations. That ethernet card didn’t come with an option disk when I bought it at a swap meet. If I hadn’t found its ADF over at the Ardent Tool, it would be utterly useless.

On the one hand IBM was working within the constraints of its era, which makes some of these decisions understandable. But on the other hand NuBus and Zorro were true plug-and-play busses, and they were developed and released at the same time! At least Micro Channel gave a blueprint for mistakes to avoid when the PCI group got around to defining the PCI configuration space.

But whatever. You’ve successfully restored and configured a Micro Channel monolith. Only one question remains—what are you going to do with it? I can hear all the shouts of “GAMES! PLAY SOME GAMES!” But look at this thing—people weren’t buying them for games. This particular Model 80 is a type 8580-081, which was announced on October 30, 1990 for a list price of $6,845—that’s almost $16,000 in today’s purchasing power. That chunk of change bought you a 20MHz Intel 386DX, 2MB of RAM, a 1.4MB floppy drive, VGA graphics, and an 80MB SCSI hard drive.

With such a lofty price tag, the only way someone could afford a machine like this was to put it to work. And wouldn’t you know it, I’ve got a productivity app perfectly suited to pay those bills: AutoCAD! Behold as it slowly paints the famous Autodesk Space Shuttle demo file line by line. I won't guess how long an actual render job would take. Honestly, this machine’s performance in Windows 3.1 is more than acceptable, even within the limitations of cooperative multitasking. 16MB of RAM and a SCSI hard drive certainly help on that front. But could I be even more productive with a higher resolution display with extra colors? If only there was a way to… extend the graphics capability of this machine. Wait a minute, there is! It’s the IBM XGA-2 graphics adapter!

This card is notable because it was IBM’s last-gasp attempt to stay in charge of PC graphics standards. Introduced in September 1992, it improved upon the first XGA card by upgrading the VRAM to a standard 1MB, adding support for 800x600 resolutions, and offering non-interlaced 1024x768 modes. And XGA-2 did all this for a list price of $360, which a fraction of the $1,095 you’d pay for a 512K XGA-1 back in 1990.

Installing this card opens up a new world of video capabilities. A graphical OS is a much better experience with a large 1024x768 desktop with 256 colors and a flicker-free 70Hz. Or I can trade resolution for color depth and get 65,000 colors at 640x480 or 800x600. And fixed-function graphics acceleration routines prevents all this pixel-pushing from pulverizing performance. This chipset had all the ingredients to succeed VGA as the de facto PC graphics standard—so why did it fail?

When IBM launched XGA in 1990 the landscape of PC graphics was shifting constantly. VGA was a massive improvement over CGA and EGA, but the hunger for higher fidelity graphics seemed insatiable. Companies like Genoa, Western Digital, and ATI released so-called Super VGA cards that displayed more colors or higher resolutions than regular VGA. Some Super VGA cards were clones of IBM’s 8514/A, the predecessor to XGA. Others extended VGA in their own ways which required specific drivers for each application. SVGA wasn’t really a standard; it was just a label that meant “somehow better than VGA.” IBM’s plan with XGA was to define a real successor architecture, publish the hardware specifications, and license out the chipset. Other manufacturers adopting XGA would kill the incompatible Super VGAs, just as VGA did to the Extended EGAs of yore.

That was a sensible strategy in 1987, but IBM’s influence had waned by 1990. Video card and monitor manufacturers agreed to work together and formed the Video Electronics Standards Association in July 1989. Going forward VESA would define a vendor-agnostic method to display Super VGA modes. The first round of VESA Video BIOS extensions released in 1990 had their limitations, but it was a sign to application developers that the madness of writing a driver for every video card would eventually come to an end. Now they could request a VESA video mode and either the card’s VBIOS or a terminate-and-stay-resident program would answer the request by changing the graphics card to the desired mode.

IBM was a member of VESA and XGA cards do support VESA modes thanks to an IBM TSR. But the catch is that IBM expected developers using VESA modes to obey the spec, and—surprise—most did not. Many apps and games directly manipulated the VGA color registers while in VESA modes. XGA’s high resolution modes don’t use the VGA palette registers, so attempts to modify them results in a corrupted palette. IBM’s TSR ends up being useless. Meanwhile, UniVBE just hangs, so there isn’t really an alternative.

The practical impact of this problem on a Model 80 is minimal because the number of games than run on a 386 with Super VGA graphics can probably be counted on one hand. The two most popular would be Links 386 and SimCity 2000, and luckily they both have XGA compatibility switches. 486 PS/2 owners with XGA will face more challenges. According to old newsgroup posts the VESA emulation in Windows 95 actually fixes the palette problem, so you might have better luck running DOS games in Windows instead.

If VESA had adopted XGA, maybe things would have been different, but IBM admitted defeat in 1993 when they switched to Cirrus-based SVGA chipsets and cards. Will an XGA-2 card help your MCA PS/2? It couldn’t hurt, especially if you like to run Windows. There’s updated drivers for Windows 9x that enable more color depths at higher resolutions. If your goal is pure DOS gaming, you might want to look elsewhere. But adding it to this Model 80 feels right. This machine deserves better than VGA graphics, and now it feels more complete.

I hope you enjoyed my tour of this monument to business arrogance. I’m not an IBM fanboy, but I have to say there’s a devilish appeal to owning something that was way out of your price range when it was new. Aaron and I agreed that if I was going to own a Micro Channel machine, this one had to be it. The only way I could make this thing even more IBM is by installing OS/2, and maybe I will some day. Until then, it’ll stay in my collection as a piece of Big Blue history.

IBM PS/2 Model 30 286 - Computers of Significant History

The slide rules, the jacquard looms, the abacus—when did you first get into collecting retro tech? We might not be going back as far as Herman Hollerith and his punchcards, but we will take a look at his great-great-grandputer. How are we gonna do it? Here in Userlandia, we’re gonna PS/2 it.

Welcome back to Computers of Significant History for another personal chapter in my personal chronology of personal computing. After examining the role of the Commodore 64 and Apple IIe in my life and yours, I’d be remiss in not addressing the big blue elephant in the room. The influence of International Business Machines could be felt everywhere before, during, and after the PC revolution. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” as the old saying goes, and many people's first exposure to computers was an IBM PC being plopped onto their desk.

You might recall from a previous Computers of Significant History that a Commodore 64 was my primary home computer until October 1997 when my uncle gave me his Compaq ProLinea 486. That’s technically correct, which as you know is the best kind of correct. But that's not the whole story, because there was another computer evicted from the house that fateful October evening. Tossed out the door with the C64 was an IBM PS/2 Model 30 286 that I had acquired just six months earlier in April. As a fellow collector of old tech, you might feel bad for those computers now—but they had no feelings. And the new one was much better. Clearly I hadn't learned anything from watching The Brave Little Toaster as a kid.

That's right, my very first IBM compatible PC, the one I left out in the cold on that windy October evening, was a genuine IBM. It came with a matching color VGA monitor, a modem, a Microsoft Mouse, and a Model M meyboard-er, keyboard. With 2 MB of RAM and a 20 MB hard drive, it met the minimum requirements to run Windows 3.1, though the experience felt less like running and more like walking. Still, it could run Windows! And I so desperately wanted a machine that could run Windows, even though I couldn’t do much more than play Solitaire or type something in Windows Write.

So in an effort to bring you that same experience, I found one on eBay for a sensible price. With 1MB of RAM and a 30MB hard drive, this config would’ve retailed for $1,895 in 1989 (which is about $4700 in today's dollars). It also came with a Digiboard multiport serial card which apparently connects to a semiconductor validation machine! That's for inspecting silicon wafers for defects at chip foundries. Neat! For a computer that’s apparently lived a life of industrial servitude it wasn’t terribly dirty inside or out when it arrived. And the floppy and hard drives still work, which is impressive given their reputation for quitting without notice.

If the drives were dead, replacing them would be challenging. IBM said that the PS in PS/2 stood for Personal System, but I wouldn’t be alone in saying that “Proprietary System” would be more accurate. Not Invented Here is a powerful drug, and IBM was high on its own supply. The PS/2 series is the classic work of an addict. You might be familiar with the most famous symptom: Micro Channel Architecture, IBM’s advanced expansion bus with features like plug and play (sort of) and 32-bit data widths (sometimes). But look inside a Model 30 and you’ll see no Micro Channel slots at all. There’s three 16-bit AT bus slots, which you know better as the Industry Standard Architecture. Omitting the patented protocol had a practical purpose; the entry level models needed lower costs to maximize margins and ISA was cheaper.

But everything else inside these boxes was just as proprietary as its more expensive siblings. Need more memory? You can’t use ordinary 30 pin SIMMs; you needed IBM branded SIMMs with specific pinouts for the PS/2. Floppy drive gone bad? Its power and data connections are combined into one cable with a completely different pinout than a standard drive. The hard drive is proprietary too—it uses a special edge connector and its custom ST506 controller is unique to these low-end PS/2s. Even the power supply had to be special, with this wacky lever for the power switch and a connector that’s completely different from an AT.

Thirty years on, upgrading and repairing these PS/2s is more complicated than other PCs. PS/2 compatible SIMMs command a premium on the used market, though handy hackers can rewire some traces on standard modules to make them work. If your floppy drive can’t be repaired, you’ll need an adapter to use a common one, and you’ll need to 3D print a bracket to mount it. Unless you stick to specific IBM-branded hard disks you’ll need to sacrifice one of your slots for a disk controller or XT-IDE adapter.

And this doesn’t stop with hardware. IBM rewrote its BIOS for the PS/2, so a machine like the Model 30 286 that walks and talks like an AT isn’t actually an AT and shouldn’t be treated as such. The PC AT included a Setup floppy to configure its BIOS settings, and the PS/2 retooled this concept into Reference Disks for Micro Channel models and Starter Disks for ISA models. We gripe about setup disks today, but firmware storage back then was pretty limited and a setup program took up too much space on a ROM or flash chip.

Since the 35 year old battery inside the PS/2’s Dallas clock chip had expired, I needed to replace it. Instead of dremeling out the epoxy and soldering in a new battery, I bought a replacement chip with a removable battery. Next step: the starter disk dance. This was no problem thanks to disk images from the Ardent Tool of Capitalism website. I imaged a floppy on my modern PC, popped it into the PS/2, and booted into IBM’s system setup utility. BIOS configuration is pretty painless for a machine of that era—all I needed to do was set the time. And, credit where it's due, it didn't even complain about Y2K. There’s even a system tutorial on the starter disk, which is surprisingly friendly.

Doing this setup routine reminded me of the last time I ran the starter disk. My original PS/2 came my way thanks to the generosity of one of my middle school teachers. In the spring of ’97 I was a fourteen year old seventh grader who’d earned a reputation as a computer whisperer. This was before formal district IT departments had taken over the management of my middle school’s tech stack, and computer labs were more like fiefdoms of the individual teachers who ran them. If a regular classroom had a computer, that was yet another responsibility thrust upon our overworked and underpaid educators. Precocious kids who spent too much time reading computer books could be tapped to solve pesky computer problems.

Seventh grade was also when students were introduced to their first technology classes. “Technology” was a catch-all term for classes about applied engineering. One day you could be building a balsa wood bridge and testing its weight load, while the next day you could be drawing blueprints in computer aided design software. Mr. Reardon’s computer lab was full of the early nineties PC clones that we’re all trying to recollect today. A motley collection of 386, 486, and Pentium PCs, this local area network introduced me to the magic of AutoCAD.

Across the hall was Mr. Nerrie’s shop. Kids today would call it a “maker space,” what with the fabrication machinery. There were plenty of computers mixed in amongst the lathes and saws: an old Mac Classic, a no-name 386, and a PS/2 Model 30 286. They ran software like circuit building programs, wind tunnel simulators, and bridge construction games. Though the PS/2 wasn’t a speedy machine it eventually told me all the flaws in my designs. Mr. Nerrie had picked up on my affinity for computers, and encouraged me to try board-level repairs. My only experience with building electronics was one of those Radio Shack circuit builder kits, so learning how to use a soldering iron helped me level up my hardware skills.

One morning in April I noticed the PS/2 had vanished from its desk. In its place was a 486 tower that had migrated from Mr. Reardon’s lab. Now the PS/2 was sitting near the outside door alongside a box of accessories.

I asked what had happened to the PS/2, and Mr. Nerrie said that it was destined for the dumpster. Then the gears started turning in my head. “Well, if they’re just throwing it away… can I take it?” After a short pause, he said “Sure, why not. It’s better off being used than in the scrap pile.” I hooked it up to some nearby peripherals and started with the starter disk. After setting up the BIOS, I formatted the hard drive and installed a fresh copy of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. With a wink and a nod to cover this misappropriation of school property, I could give this machine a second life. Getting it home was a chore—thanks for picking me up, mom. After setting it up in my bedroom, I stared at the DOS prompt. Now that I had this PC, what was I going to do with it?

Baud to the Bone

A PS/2 Model 30 286 wasn’t exactly a barn burner when it was new, and by the time I got one in 1997 it was laughably obsolete. That was the year of the Pentium II and 3dfx Voodoo breaking boundaries in 3D gaming. The only thing more absurd than using a 286 every day in 1997 would be… well, using a C64 every day in 1997. But when you’re lost in an 8-bit desert, any 16-bit machine feels like a refreshing glass of water.

Compared to my Commodore, the PS/2 had some significant advantages. Its 10MHz 286 CPU wasn’t a Pentium, but it was far more capable at crunching numbers than a 6510. 2 MB of RAM dwarfed the 64K that gave the C64 its name. VGA graphics with 256K of video memory gave glorious 256 color video, which was sixteen times the 64’s sixteen colors. 1.4MB floppies had nearly ten times the storage of a 170K CBM disk. The cherry on top was the 20MB hard drive, which wasn’t much but was still better than the C64’s nothing. The only advantage the C64 had was its SID sound chip which blew the PS/2’s piezoelectric PC speaker away, Memorex style.

Sadly, this machine wasn’t meant for games. The true second wave of DOS PC gaming relied on the combined power of a 386 CPU, SoundBlaster digital audio, and VGA graphics. Even if I added a sound card to the PS/2’s VGA graphics, I would still be missing the third piece of the PC gaming triforce. At least the PS/2 could manage some rounds of SimCity Classic or Wolfenstein 3D. That was fine by me because game consoles filled in the gap. We still had our collection of regular and Super Nintendo games, and my older brother had recently bought a PlayStation thanks to money he earned from his job at Stop and Shop.

The PS/2 might have lacked gaming prowess, but it could do something that my games consoles and C64 couldn’t: connect to the outside world. Included in the accessories box was a 1200 baud Hayes Smartmodem. Before you “well, actually” me, I know that my Commodore could dial into a BBS. There were plenty of C64 BBSes back in the eighties. But our C64 didn’t have a modem and by the time I was old enough to dial in—well, there may have been some Commodore boards left, but I certainly couldn't find them. PC BBSes, though—there were plenty of those.

Being a terminally online teen was harder in 1997. If I wanted to surf the Information Superhighway, I had to do it after school in the computer lab. Even if I could have afforded an ISP’s monthly service costs, a 286 PS/2 couldn’t run a graphical web browser. Bulletin boards were text based and thus had much lower system requirements. And they were free, so even a broke teen like me could use them. But there were strings attached. Because most boards had only one or two phone lines, every user had a connection time limit. After using your hour of credit you were done for the day. The same went for file transfers—if you wanted to download a file you needed to upload something in return lest you be branded a leech. And the Sysop who’s actually footing the bill can ban anyone at any time for any reason.

Armed with a copy of Telix I downloaded at school and a notepad of numbers from my buddy Scott, I was ready to dial in to my first bulletin board. He recommended The Maze, so I keyed in the number: 413-684-… well, I won’t say the last four digits. After some squawking and buzzing noises from the modem the PS/2 successfully connected to this magical world. I sat and watched as a logo crafted from ASCII text slowly painted line by line across the VGA monitor. 1200 bits per second was excruciating; I was used to my middle school’s blazing fast 128 kilobit frame relay connection. After this interminable wait, I was presented with a login prompt.

I had to register an account to gain access. This meant writing an introductory post to the sysop and creating a handle. Introducing myself was easy enough because Scott was already a Maze member and he could vouch for me. But a handle, that was more difficult. Bandit or Rubber Duck were too obvious. Then it struck me: I could use a character name from a video game. Even though I was hooked on the PlayStation at the time, I still had a soft spot for the Super Nintendo. Final Fantasy was one of my favorite video game series and it was full of memorable characters. It was settled: Kefka would be my handle.

After I filled out the registration form, the board said to check in the next day to see if my account was approved. After a seemingly endless day of school, I raced home to dial in and see if my request had been granted. I powered on the PS/2, launched Telix, and mashed number one in the phone book. After waiting an eternity for the logo to draw line by line, I typed in my user name and password—and it worked! The main menu slowly painted in its options: file downloads, message boards, something called doors—was the owner a Jim Morrison fan? Navigating the board took ages because of the modem’s narrow 120 character per second pipe. In hindsight it was probably a bad idea for a 14 year old kid—even a smart and precocious one like me—to be in an environment like this. The average user of The Maze was a college or late high school student with interests to match. I was a stupid newbie which meant I made a bunch of mistakes. Shep—the sysop—was a friendly enough guy who gave me some firm lessons in board etiquette, like “don’t drop carrier” and “don’t ping the sysop for a chat every time you log in.” I learned quickly enough to avoid being branded a lamer.

But while I never got into trouble online, my bulletin board adventures managed to get me into some trouble offline. Thankfully not the legal kind, as no teenage boy would ever try to download warez or inappropriate material. No, I made the most common mistake for a computer-loving kid: costing your parents money. One day I came home from school to find my mother angrily waving a phone bill in my face. My parents begrudgingly tolerated my modem usage as long as it was early in the morning or late in the evening when we weren’t expecting phone calls. However, there was one rule I literally couldn’t afford to break: no long distance calls.

Massachusetts’ 413 area code spans a lot of area from Worcester county all the way to the New York state border. You could incur toll charges calling within your own area code, and NYNEX offered a Dial-Around plan for those who wanted a consistent bill instead of surprise charges. But most people were like my parents—they didn’t make enough toll calls to justify its price and took their chances on metered billing instead. NYNEX and the other baby Bells published a list of exchanges that were within your local dialing area. Pittsfield’s list felt arbitrary—one number fifteen miles away in Adams was free, while another number eight miles away in Lee was a toll call. So I checked every board’s number to make sure I wouldn’t rack up a bill.

My cunning scheme was undone by the fact that NYNEX would occasionally break apart exchanges and shift around which ones were in your toll-free region. These weren't unannounced, but I was fourteen and I didn't read the phone bill. One local BBS number turned into a long distance call overnight, and I wasn’t checking the toll status after marking local numbers. Unbeknownst to me I was racking up toll charges left and right. My free computer and free bulletin boards wound up costing me eighty dollars, and I had to pay back every penny to the bank of mom and dad.

Most of my memories of the summer of 1997 revolve around the PS/2 and the hours I spent dialing in to various bulletin boards. Another teacher lending me a faster modem certainly helped. Mrs. Pughn, who ran the Mac lab, lent me a US Robotics Sportster 9600 modem to use over the break. This was a far more usable experience than my 1200 bit slowpoke. Menu screens painted almost instantly. I could download a whole day’s worth of message board posts for offline reading in two minutes instead of fifteen. That saved valuable time credits that could be spent playing door games instead.

Every bulletin board had its own flavor imparted by the sysop that fronted the cash for its lines and hardware. This was especially true of The Maze, which ran CNet BBS software on an Amiga 4000. I learned that a door wasn’t a music reference but a term for games and software launched by the BBS. One of my favorite door games was Hacker, where other board users set up simulated computer systems that everyone else tries to take down with virtual viruses. I played a decent amount of classics like Legend of the Red Dragon and TradeWars 2002, but nothing quite lived up to Hacker in my eyes.

My uncle’s hand-me-down 486 came with a 28.8K modem, and that opened up even more BBS opportunities. Downloading software, listening to MOD music, and even dial-up Doom sessions were now part of daily life. But the 486 also brought the Internet into my home. By 1997 America Online had an internet gateway and could access the World Wide Web. My uncle was an AOL subscriber, and he convinced my dad to sign up too. Now that I was browsing the web at home, how could a BBS ever compete? BBSes were already declining in 1997, but 1998 was when things really fell apart in the 413. One by one boards went dark as their owners traded BBS software for web servers. I spent the summer of ’98 crafting my first Geocities homepage and getting sucked into my first online fandom: Final Fantasy VII.

By the fall of 1998 the Maze would shut down and my regular usage of BBSes died too. The web was just too compelling. Some 413 regulars tried to set up an IRC channel called 413scene on the EFnet network, but it didn’t last beyond 1999. I still remember boards like The Maze, Mos Eisley, and The Void like the way people remember old nightclubs. Handles like Menelaus and Boo Berry still stick with me even though I have no way of contacting them. If you were active in the 413 scene in the late nineties, send me a message. Maybe we crossed digital paths.

The Big Blue Meanies

Once upon a time a personal computer was any kind of small system meant for a single user. But somewhere along the way the term came to mean something much more specific: an IBM compatible personal computer. One by one the myriad independent microcomputers of the 1980s succumbed to the “IBM and Compatible” hegemony. Even if you stood proud aboard another platform, it was only a matter of time until IBM and the armada of cloners aimed their cannons at your ship’s market share.

But despite having created the leading personal computing platform of its day, IBM wasn't as in control as they thought. Lawsuits could stop the blatant copies of their BIOS made by the likes of Eagle—but not clean-room reverse engineering. Now cloners are grudgingly tolerated because they followed IBM's standards. But the sheer effrontery of a cloner thinking they can dictate a standard?! Preposterous! We are IBM! We are personal computers!

So when Intel announced the 80386 CPU in October 1985, everyone in the industry—especially Intel—expected IBM to adopt the new 32-bit processor. The 286’s segmented memory model was unpopular with programmers, and the 386 addressed those criticisms directly with an overhauled memory model. And Intel managed to do this without breaking backwards compatibility. This was perfect for the next generation of PCs—great performance for today and 32-bit capability for tomorrow. But the mood in Armonk was muted at best.

Intel planned to ship the 386 in volume in June of 1986, but IBM’s top brass was skeptical that Intel could hit that date based on prior experience with the 286. They also thought that was too soon to be replacing the two year old PC AT. Big Blue’s mainframe and workstation divisions thought a 32-bit personal computer would encroach on their very expensive turf. This was in direct conflict with IBM’s PC pioneer Don Estridge, who saw the potential of the 386 as he watched its development in late 1984 into early ‘85. He  wanted to aggressively adopt the new CPU, but he faced tough internal barriers. Estridge was losing other political battles inside IBM, and by March 1985 he lost his spot atop the Entry Systems Division to Bill Lowe. After Estridge tragically died in the crash of Delta flight 191 in August 1985, there was no one left in the higher echelons of IBM to advocate for the 386. They were committed to the 286 in both hardware and software. And so IBM gave Intel a congratulatory statement in public and a “we’ll think about it” in private.

But you know who didn’t have any of those pesky internal politics? A feisty little Texas startup called Compaq. Intel wanted a partner to aggressively push the 386, and Compaq wanted to prove that they were more than just a cloner. This was a pivotal moment in the evolution of the PC, because Compaq and Intel weren’t waiting around for IBM to advance the industry standard. Compaq launched the DeskPro 386 in September 1986. It was effectively a slap in the face from Compaq CEO Rod Canion and chairman Ben Rosen, daring IBM to release a 386 machine in six months or lose their title of industry leader. Such a challenge could not go unanswered. Seven months later in April 1987 IBM announced the Personal System/2, a line of computers that thoroughly reimagined what the “IBM PC” was supposed to be. Big Blue would exert their overwhelming influence to change the course of an entire industry, just like they did six years earlier. Or, at least, that was the plan.

The PS/2’s development history isn’t well documented—contemporary sources are thin on details about the engineering team, and there’s no present-day oral histories or deep dives from primary sources about its development timeline. According to the book Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM by Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Carrol, there wasn’t a single 386 chip inside IBM when Compaq announced the DeskPro. I do know that Chet Heath, the architect of Micro Channel, started designing the bus back in 1983. So when Bill Lowe was forced to react to Compaq’s challenge, he saw an opportunity to pair Micro Channel with the 386. IBM announced the Model 80 386 along with its siblings in April of ’87, but it didn’t actually ship until August. That was almost a year after Compaq launched the DeskPro 386. Compaq issued that six-month challenge because they were confident they'd win.

Then again, IBM didn’t see it that way. They weren’t designing just a single computer, but a whole family of computers. The PS/2’s launch lineup—the Models 30, 50, 60, and 80—covered every segment of the market from basic office PC to monster workstation server tower. Besides Micro Channel the PS/2 would usher in new technologies like ESDI and SCSI hard drives, VGA graphics, bidirectional parallel ports, high density 1.4MB 3 1/2 inch floppies, and tool-less case designs. IBM was sure the PS/2 would redefine the trajectory of the entire industry. And, to be fair to Big Blue, that's exactly what happened. Just… not in the way they'd hoped.

Aesthetically the PS/2 was a clean break from IBM’s previous PCs. IBM always had a flair for industrial design, and a PS/2’s bright white chassis featured sharp angles, repeating slats, and a signature blue accent color. They wouldn’t be mistaken for any old clone, that’s for sure. These sharp dressed desktops were also considerably smaller than previous PCs. Integrating more standard features on the motherboard meant fewer slots and cards were needed for a fully functioning system. Disk drives took up a lot of space, and using 3 1/2 inch floppy and hard disk drives let them save many cubic inches. Ultimately, the Model 30's slimline case was almost half the size of a PC AT by volume.

A consequence of this strategy was abandoning the standard AT motherboard layout. Now each model had its own specially designed motherboard—excuse me, planar—and the number of slots you got depended on how much you were willing to spend. The entry-level Model 30 only had three 8-bit ISA slots. The mid-range Model 50 bought you four 16-bit MCA slots. The high-end Models 60 and 80 came in tower cases with eight MCA slots each, three of which were 32-bit in the model 80 to unleash the power of the 386. It’s ladder-style market segmentation that only an MBA could love.

IBM had a very specific customer in mind when they designed the Model 30: businesspeople who spent all day in WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 and weren’t particularly picky about performance. IBM took the aging PC XT, dumped it in a blender with some PS/2 spices for flavor, and the result was a slimline PC with just enough basic features for basic business work. And if IBM sold a few to the home office types, well, all the better. The stylish new Model 30 was your ticket to the modern business world, and your friends at IBM were happy to welcome you aboard their merry-go-round of service agreements and replacement parts.

A launch day Model 30 with an 8086 CPU, 640K of RAM, 720K floppy drive, and 20 MB hard disk retailed for $2,295 in 1987. If you were strapped for cash, ditching the hard disk for a second floppy would save you $600—which you could use to buy yourself a monitor, because those weren't included. And don't go thinking you'd get full-fat VGA graphics for that price, either—the Model 30 had MCGA, a skim version of VGA that was never widely supported.

PC XT clones were still a thing in 1987, but they were advertised as bargain machines, which the Model 30 was decidedly not. Flipping through the PS/2’s launch issue of PC Magazine shows the state of the market. Michael Dell’s PCs Limited would happily sell you a Turbo XT clone with EGA graphics, 20MB hard drive, and color monitor for $1699. Or you could get an 8MHz 286 for the same price as a Model 30 with hard drive. If you were feeling more adventurous, the back-page advertisers were offering monochrome Turbo XTs for $995 and under. Things aren’t much better when we compare the Model 50 and 60 against Turbo AT clones, let alone the Model 80. CDW offered Compaq DeskPro 386s with 40 meg drives for $4879. A base Model 80—with 1MB of RAM, a 1.4 Meg floppy, and a 44MB hard disk—was just under $7,000.

And IBM’s prices didn’t get any better despite improvements to the Model 30. Fourteen months later, the Model 30 286 came out. With 512K of RAM, VGA graphics, and—oops, no hard drive—it could be yours for just under two thousand dollars. If you wanted a 20MB hard drive, that was a mere $600 extra! These prices looked even worse a few months later, when the cloners would sell you 10MHz AT with the same specs and a color VGA monitor for $1899. The price for a Model 30 286 with 1MB RAM and 20MB hard disk fell to $1795 in late 1989, but the competition was getting even tougher. By 1990 you could get double the memory, double the hard disk space, and double the processor speed for the same price. All IBM could muster in 1990 was a 40MB hard drive option before discontinuing the Model 30 in 1991.

It’s a pretty cool coincidence that IBM announced the Model 30 286 on the same day that Compaq and eight other manufacturers announced the 32-bit Extended Industry Standard Architecture bus. The new Model 30 286 was seen as an admission by IBM that they couldn’t quite kill ISA despite Big Blue’s protestations. For all of Micro Channel’s vaunted technical superiority, IBM had a hard time convincing others to adopt the bus. The main impediment was royalty fees. Building MCA machines required a license from IBM plus a royalty of up to five percent of your revenue for each machine sold—and back payments for all prior machines sold with the AT bus. Some clone makers did end up licensing MCA. Tandy was the first to sell a third-party MCA machine, and ALR and NCR produced a decent amount. But vendors like Dell backed out because MCA was either too expensive or difficult to implement. And even if you did put the money and effort into it, Micro Channel clones were slow sellers.

Peripheral makers weren’t doing any better. Micro Channel introduced the concept of vendor IDs, which told the computer who made the board and what kind of board it was. These IDs were a requirement for MCA’s self-configuration ability. But IBM slow-rolled the assignment of those IDs, leaving board makers like AST in the lurch when IBM didn’t answer their phones—and that's not just an expression, IBM literally didn't answer when AST called them. Even when IBM got around to assigning IDs, sometimes their left hand issued ones that their right hand had already issued to different vendors, resulting in device conflicts. For a while there was a risk that being “Compliant” would be no better than just assigning yourself an ID number and hoping it wouldn't conflict.

By 1992 Micro Channel’s window of opportunity had closed despite IBM adding it to their RISC workstations. EISA gained a foothold in the server market, VESA launched a new Local Bus standard for graphics cards, and Intel was busy drafting the first version of PCI. The PS/2 wasn’t a complete failure, because IBM did sell a lot of them, but its signature feature ironically worked against their plans to reclaim control of the PC market. Its real legacy was its keyboard and mouse ports along with the VGA graphics standard, because IBM didn't keep them in its hoard along with Micro Channel.

By the fall of 1994 the Personal System brand was dead. The entry-level PS/2s, the PS/1, and the PS/ValuePoint systems for home users fell in battle and were replaced by the Aptiva line of PCs. Higher-end PS/2s were replaced by the “PC Series” computers, which is totally not a confusing name. The clones had won so decisively that they had evolved beyond that simplistic moniker. Compaq, Gateway, Dell, and others joined with Intel to define the standard for PC hardware, and the era of “IBM and compatible” was well and truly dead. It was replaced by the Wintel platform of x86 Intel processors running Microsoft Windows. It was like the end of Animal Farm—or maybe Server Farm. Looking from IBM to the cloners and back to IBM, and not being able to tell which was which.

Mr. Big Blue Sky

I still have some misplaced fondness for IBM, even though they haven’t manufactured a PC for nearly twenty years. One part comes from that summer of 1997 where my scrap-heap PS/2 was my way of connecting to a new and unfamiliar world. Another part is industrial design. They’re not Apple, but you can look at an IBM product and know that it was designed by people with principles. The last part is the fact that IBMs were Serious Computers for Serious Business, and having one meant you were a Serious Somebody.

But in order for “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” to be true, IBM had to remain a safe bet. And while PS/2s were generally reliant and performant machines, IBM had stepped on several strategic rakes with Micro Channel. That, plus uncompetitive pricing, meant that IBM products weren't automatically the safe choice. The mark against clones was that they could be incompatible in ways you didn’t expect. Or, at least, that was true in the mid-80s, but by the time 1990 rolled around BIOS developers like Phoenix, Award, and American Megatrends had everything sorted out. Even if the cloners were competitors, they could work together when it counted and develop standards like EISA and ATA to fill in their technological gaps. If IBM products couldn’t actually do the job you wanted them to do, what what was the point with sticking with Big Blue?

So consider the Model 30 286 in this scenario. Because it used 16-bit ISA slots and was an unassuming office machine, it was able to wiggle into more places than a Micro Channel Model 50 could. That’s why the Model 30 286 sold as well as it did to business and government customers, even when faced with stiff clone competition. But even those sales dried up when 286 PCs stopped being competitive. The release of Windows 3.0 and the ascendancy of PC multimedia energized the home PC market, which is where IBM historically had problems—hello, PCjr. It’s not that they didn’t try—see the PS/1 and PS/ValuePoint computers—but, like today, most people were more price sensitive than brand loyal. When they were flipping through mail-order catalogs of Dells and Gateways or going down the aisles of Nobody Beats the Wiz, they weren’t going to spend an extra 20% on the security blanket of an IBM badge. After all, "nobody ever got fired" only really applies to jobs. This was reflected in IBM’s balance sheet, where they posted billions of dollars of losses in 1993.

Thankfully for IBM there was still a place for them to flex their innovative and proprietary muscles, and that was the laptop market. The ThinkPad started out as a PS/2 adjacent project, and the less price sensitive nature of business travelers meant IBM didn’t have to worry about economizing. Featuring tank-like build quality wrapped in a distinctive red-on-black industrial design, the ThinkPad actually stood out from other PC laptops thanks to innovations like the TrackPoint and the butterfly keyboard. But the ThinkPad is best saved for another episode.

I can't recommend a Model 30 286 for, say, your primary retro gaming PC. It’s slower and harder to fix than contemporary AT clones and isn’t quite up to snuff for enjoying the greatest hits of DOS gaming. 386 and 486 PS/2s might have enough CPU power, but finding Micro Channel sound cards is a pain and the same proprietary pitfalls apply. But that doesn’t mean they’re not worth collecting—just have one as your secondary machine or run software that plays to its strengths. They look sharp on display, especially if you can scrounge up all the matching accessories. Besides, Micro Channel machines are historical artifacts that provide a window into another weird, forgotten standard that lost its war. Kinda like Betamax, or SmartMedia cards, or HD-DVD.

Now that we’re thirty years beyond the turmoil of Micro Channel and the clone wars, a PS/2 is no longer bound by the rules and desires of its creator. A computer may just be a tool, and unfeeling Swedish minimalists might say that our things don’t have feelings, but we’re humans and we have feelings, damnit. And an object can express our feelings through its design or function. So while my specific PS/2 didn’t go on a globetrotting adventure to find its way back home, I think spiritually it’s found its way back, and I’ve lovingly restored it just as the Master did to his toaster. While some might scoff at a Model 30 and say “no true PS/2 has ISA slots,” the badge on the front is pretty clear. Although its tenure in my life was a short one, this system was pretty personal to me.

The VCF Midwest 2023 Report

You! Yes, you! Are you wondering if anyone shares your passion for an old arcane operating system? Then I’ve got the place for you! Come on down to Vintage Computer Festival Midwest! It’s the most happening place for obsolete tech this side of Lake Michigan! They’ve got Commodores, they’ve got Apples, they’ve got stuff you haven’t even heard of! What the Hell is this? I don’t know, but I wanna find out! Here in Userlandia, we’re going to Chicagolandia for VCF Midwest.

It’s September, and you know what that means—computer con! Geeks across America leap aboard planes, ride friendly trains, or climb into automobiles to make their way to VCF Midwest. With 2023 being its eighteenth edition, it’s been around long enough that people could yearn for its early days. Nostalgia for a thing celebrating nostalgia? Stranger things have happened. The show’s popularity has risen dramatically over the past five or six years, and there’s never been a better time to meet up with fellow enthusiasts of obsolete technology.

Success breeds success and VCF’s attendance has grown year over year as folks like me come in from parts unknown. As I boarded my flight from Logan to O’Hare, I wondered how they would accommodate the expected increase in crowd size. Going to the show with me was my friend Mark, an Illinois local who lives about twenty minutes away from the venue. He’s a veritable regular, having attended the show since 2019. After stuffing a hot hatchback full of old computers and components to donate to the show, we hopped on I-294 and made our way to the Waterford Banquet and Conference Center at Elmhurst’s Clarion Inn. The conditions for attending VCF were largely the same as years past. Free entry? Check. Free tables? Check. Free Parking? Also check. We expected the show to have more attendees than last year, and adjusted our plans accordingly.

Number one: get there early enough to get a good parking spot. We got one of the last remaining spots when we showed up ten minutes before opening time last year. This year we showed up about half an hour before opening and empty spots were already becoming scarce. Somehow we scored a primo parking spot near the doors.

Number two: pack a lunch. Last year the line at the cafe was extremely long and we lost our parking spot after going out to eat. Bringing some sandwiches, chips, and Polars saved us both time and stress.

Number three: bring a hand truck. Last year we had to make multiple trips to the faraway parking spot to unload donations. A hand truck reduced it all to one easily managed delivery of servers and PCs directly to the garage sale.

Some things just can’t be planned around, like waiting in lines or navigating through the sea of bodies or when interesting stuff shows up in the free pile. But what you can plan for is all the cool stuff you’ll see at the show’s amazing array of exhibitors.

Exhibits and Ambience

Just as Mark and I tweaked our plans for attending, the VCF Staff did the same for exhibiting. A big challenge facing VCF Midwest 2023 was the demand for exhibitor space. Allocating floor space for exhibits and tables was so tricky that the show needed to implement a waitlist for the first time in its history. To create more room, the VCF staff relocated the Panel and Auction space from Hall A to a downstairs function room. Now all four sections of the Waterford’s main ballroom could be combined into one large exhibit hall, resulting in 25% more exhibition space. This created some unique logistical challenges for the auction, which I’ll address later, but the tradeoff was worth it.

The crew also optimized the space between tables to improve navigation in the ballroom. Last year the wall dividers were partially open to let people cut through from hall to hall, and this year the dividers were opened even further. Combine that with a central alley bisecting all four rooms and you could walk from one end of the ballroom to another without exiting to the main hallway. Compared to last year the main ballroom actually felt less claustrophobic despite the mammoth crowd of people. One place where crowding can’t be fixed is the main hallway, which serves double duty as vendor space and people space. The vendors lining both sides of the hall and the free pile attracted a sea of people during peak hours, which generated wave after wave of traffic.

Computers of all kinds are peppered throughout the ballroom, but it’s fair to say that the more power-hungry Jurassic-era megafauna congregated in Hall D. Familiar faces like the Meridian PBX and the VCF Midwest phone system from Shadytel Midwest anchored a room full of terminals and workstations. Turn right from the door and you’ll land upon this set of Apollo Workstations. I loved seeing these since I used to live a mile away from Apollo’s headquarters in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Forgotten Machines’ massive exhibit featured all kinds of stuff from companies that are long gone, like Data General. Did you know RCA made microprocessors? I didn’t until seeing them at Josh Bensadon’s table!

Scott Swayze’s Retromodem was a piece of hardware after my own heart. It’s a replacement PCB for external Hayes Smartmodems just like the 1200 baud one I had back in the day. It connects to your Wifi network up to the maximum supported speed of your serial port, and even makes simulated dial tone sounds when you connect to a telnet bulletin board. It wasn’t the only WiFi to modem bridge on display, either—the WiRSa adapter is a cute little device that bridges your old machine to a new network.

Almost all of these exhibits of the sixties and seventies era machines had some kind of guided demo to help explain these machine’s roles in “data processing.” A common theme amongst these exhibitors of niche and very old equipment is sharing the unique experiences of machines that are hard to find. Steve Maves had a NeXTstation, DEC AlphaStation, and a blue and white G3 with a 21 inch monitor all on one table. That’s so laser focused to my tastes that I couldn’t help but bask in 21 inches of Trinitron glory.

Though other beefy workstations were peppered around all four halls, it was nice to see the evolution of “real machines for real work” as you walked up and down the aisles of Hall D. There were enough Silicon Graphics boxes on display to explore the real breadth and depth of their power. System Source was back, this time with some new additions to their lineup. Other SGI stands included a multiplayer mini-LAN with graphics performance that would have blown away a contemporary PC.

Most people visiting the show are going to be interested in their own favorite platforms, and there’s a healthy balance of hits and deep cuts from the exhibitors. I figure that Commodore was the most well-represented company, with over a dozen tables featuring 64s, 128s, and Amigas. The most distinctive had to be this Commodore Colt PC—I’ve never seen a Commodore PC clone in person before, and this was a fine example. Most tables featured a unique thing you could do with a Commodore, like Paul Wilga showing off a C64 playing Sonic and a C128 with an 8-bit Guitar Hero clone. CBMstuff featured their colored keycaps, Wifi modems, and even a Mega65. It was my first time seeing a Mega65 in person and I have to admit that it looked really cool. Amigas were peppered about here and there, but Ethan Dicks probably earned the award for most Amigas on one table. This funky tower lived side by side with an A1000 and A3000.

You can’t go to an old computer show without tripping over a bunch of Apple computers, and this one’s no exception. Friend of the show Sean from Action Retro had his modded SE/30, of course, but it was joined by one of his new acquisitions: a wicked-fast IIfx. Next door was Joshua Stein, with a working Mac Portable and PowerBook 100 side by side. Passers-by could get a real sense of the magic Sony pulled off in transforming the former into the latter. Speaking of cool portables, Pete R. had a full DuoDock connected to a portable Color StyleWriter. There’s not enough printing at these shows, and anyone who facilitates it gets a gold star. Other cool friends Ron from Ron’s Computer Vids and Steve from Mac84 were nearby to talk all about old Macs. Need some floppies copied for your Apple II? Intergalactic Microsystems had a live AppleSauce setup that could burn your disk images to a real floppy on demand. Avery Grade and Bea Thurman’s Apple II Sight and Sound had this monster stack of Apple IIgs multimedia which let the computer really flex its audiovisual muscle. The towering Altec Lansing speakers are the peak of 1990s computer audio aesthetic. Lots of Mac mods were on sale from CaymacVintage, with ROM SIMMs, flashers for those SIMMs, diagnostic equipment, and more oddly specific stuff for your oddly specific Mac.

Atari computers and consoles rivaled Commodore in how much table space they occupied. The Chicago Atarians lead the charge with this fantastic Atari VCS display, which carries the torch from their big glass cabinet that unfortunately perished after last year’s show. Ever used an Atari Falcon? I got a chance to test drive one thanks to Liam Coyne’s display of ST systems. Maybe 8 bits is more your style, and if that’s the case you could see a whole lineup at Slor’s Atari for Show, Small Iron for Dough. If you want to connect to other Atari fans using original hardware, the Atari BBS community had live demos to show how you can still go online with your Atari computer in 2023. And if you’re interested in BASIC programming on the Atari ST, check out this Apollo standalone running the GFA Basic editor.

What about IBM and compatibles? Joshua Conboy’s OS/2 and You returns, this time with even more paraphernalia and boxed software. Kevin Moonlight’s collection of IBM Palmtop Thinkpads demonstrated that a little chassis could mean big power. Of course they can run DOOM, but did you know they could be repurposed to portable video players? If workstations and servers are more your style, then Mike Mason and Chris Simmons’ tables have what you need. An AS/4000 next to a PS/2 Academic System tower shows that whether it comes in black or white, IBM knows how to make a good looking server. IBM tech also powered this retro selfie station thanks to this washing machine-sized printer. Where iBM goes, clones tend to follow, and there’s plenty of PC platform equipment lurking about.

With the host of the usual British computer exhibition unable to exhibit at the show this year, the community had to step up to ensure representation of computing from across the pond. Sinclair systems of all kinds were highlighted at Scott Hardin’s table. The Other 8-Bit Computer Maker had the full line of Sinclairs from the ZX80 all the way to the modern ZX Spectrum Next. And since the Spectrum is one of the most-cloned systems out there, you could see some modern reproductions on display from Chris and Gavin Tersteeg.

If you thought I’d forget about the Tandy folks, think again. VCF Midwest takes place during SepTandy, after all! Almost every hall had a CoCo or two running a demo. And you can’t escape the TRS-80; this one at Nihongo Retro had a very cool floppy replacement with USB thumb drives.

Japanese computers also had a healthy presence thanks to some new and returning faces. Danielle from Thegirlgeek returned with the Casio Loopy and Sharp x68000, but there were other x68000s lurking about as well. Nearby was nephrite.fm with Nihongo Retro, which had a lovely NEC PC-98. Not one, but two Famicom Basic setups were on display this year. And if you were curious about the MSX, Liam Coyne’s Sony MSX setup was a fine way to see the platform that built Hideo Kojima’s empire.

Dante Blando had this neat micro server called the NetWinder. Made by Corel of CorelDraw fame, the NetWinder could be deployed as a slim server or workstation. It has the distinction of being the first commercial ARM-based Linux machine. Neat!

Want a Gravis Ultrasound but don’t have the scratch to get one on eBay? Ian Scott’s PicoGUS can bring one to your ISA-based computer thanks to the power of the Raspberry Pi Pico. And if you want to learn more about other PC sound cards, the OPL Archive can fill you in on the wonders of FM synthesis.

Hey Kids, it’s Crusty the Mac! This Mac SE has survived multiple burials, and amazingly still works, although when I came by it wasn’t running anything or doing anything. This meme machine makes a rustic fashion statement at every festival it visits.

Keeping a returning exhibit fresh is a challenge on its own, and the folks at Genericable are doing their best to keep the excitement around obsolete cable television alive. Preview Guide and the Weather Channel kept everyone up-to-date on the event’s programming and weather conditions. Princess Twilight Sparkle has blessed the weather this weekend, apparently. Sit down with a character generator and make your own title sequences to show off to your friends at home!

Lastly, I’d like to give an award for “Committing to the bit” to this giant SX-64. This macrocomputer is exactly the kind of gimmick I want to see at these shows. The CMBSX64 Ultimax looks like the kind of interactive exhibit you’d find in a science museum. Very cool.

Testing the Limits

VCF Midwest has called the Waterford Conference Center its home since 2019, and every event has exceeded expectations. With an estimated 3,000 attendees this year—nearly 50% more than last year—VCF is showing no signs of slowing down. And that popularity brings some complications, both expected and unexpected. For 2023 the venue and VCF staff tackled these challenges head-on, and they largely succeeded.

The first—and most obvious—limit is parking. This year VCF Staff made official arrangements for overflow parking, but it was quickly exhausted on Saturday. Given its location in suburban Chicagoland, cars are the only practical way to get there. Carpooling might be a good idea if you’re local! If you’re staying at an offsite hotel, consider sharing a ride with a fellow attendee. There isn’t much more that can be done except moving to a new venue, so my advice to fellow attendees is to arrive early and plan your day so you don’t lose your spot.

I’ve already mentioned the adjustments made to the exhibit hall to maximize table space. I think these moves worked out in favor of the show, because more tables means a wider variety of exhibitors. But allowing more tables isn’t without complications. Power was particularly problematic—there were considerable voltage sags as the weekend progressed. Many demos and machines lost power at various times during the weekend. Some exhibitors scrambled for voltage regulators while others had to wait for electricity to be restored. Expanding into Hall A was also the last lever the show could pull to increase indoor exhibit space—there’s literally nowhere left to put tables without making significant compromises.

Another consequence of expanding the exhibit space is changing the flow of walking traffic. I thought the main ballroom felt less crowded overall despite more people attending the show. Most of the attendees were cognizant of not blocking aisles, and exhibitors did a good job of keeping their tables within their actual space. But when you put a bunch of bodies in one room you’re bound to hit a few snags. Take the end cap of Hall B. It’s been the traditional home of the show’s VIP guests, and on the face it sounds like a great idea. Being able to meet LGR, Krazy Ken, 8-Bit Guy, Voidstar, and Ben Heck all in one row of tables sounds like an amazing idea. But the downside to that is lines, lines, and more lines. Plus, when a non-tabling guest holds court nearby, that adds even more bodies into the mix. Thankfully the lines eased up as the show went on, but there was always a bunch of bodies in the area. Are there ways to solve this? Absolutely, but they come with their own tradeoffs. VIPs could be split up and moved around the hall to clear up the jams, but that takes away some of the magic of seeing all these people together. Plus, the guests might like being in their traditional spots! The right and proper solution is a dedicated VIP area with queues, but the guests might not like that isolation, and it can’t be done in the current venue anyway due to lack of floor space.

Lines and bottlenecks weren’t exclusive to the VIP guests, either. This year the show’s doors didn’t actually open until 9, and sure enough a significant line formed at the door. This line took a while to clear as it immediately led into the garage sale and T-shirt tables, which formed their own line that interfered with this line! There is an alternate entrance to the venue, so you weren’t blocked completely, but if you were a newbie this wasn’t eminently obvious. There’s not enough space to relocate those tables, and the doors aren’t wide enough to set up multiple entry queues without blocking egress. The sizable T-shirt and garage sale line did move at a reasonable pace during the day, but you needed to commit to it. I don’t think it cleared up until the T-shirts sold out in the mid-afternoon.

The last bottleneck is food service. You were going to wait a while to get lunch from the venue’s cafe, and tables were crowded. If you weren’t hungry enough for lunch but still felt a bit peckish, a stand offering snacks and drinks for sale was open in the main hall on Saturday. That was new for this year and it’s a smart way to let people get something light without clogging up the main counter. Also, I understand that encouraging people to buy lunch to support the venue is a noble idea, but a single register is not up to the task of feeding everybody at the show. We brought our home-packed lunches because we had the capability and that freed up a spot in line for someone that was traveling from out of town and needed to eat at the cafe. To cover my lack of buying lunch I donated an extra $20 to the show, but I’d have no problem spending that money on expanded food options if I didn’t have to wait 30 or 40 minutes in line.

Let’s Make a Deal

VCF Midwest is jokingly referred to as an overgrown flea market, and the people cracking those jokes aren’t wrong. Just like last year, vendors in the hallway and some exhibitors in the ballroom are happy to sell you just about anything. If you’re hunting for something specific, this is a good place to find it. Computers, parts, and paraphernalia are all here if you’re willing to open your wallet.

Most of the vendors were folks in the main hallway selling hardware and software in spreads across their tables. Karl and Ted’s Excellent Macventure specialized entirely on classic Macs and Mac accessories. There were more Macs at this table than I could count, and I’d say they’d sold about 95% of them by Sunday afternoon. Bonus Life Computers were back with more restored machines, and the usual Commodores and Tandys were joined by this cool Tektronix terminal. The Wisconsin Computer Club was parked in their usual spot by the corner with an impressive array of parts for many old machines. BitHistory’s buckets of big box software was cool, but these Zenith Data Systems laptops are even cooler.

If you weren’t looking for hardware, there were plenty of people selling software. Big box, small box, jewel box, and even no box programs were available. Plenty of console games were for sale too, with box after box available at an outdoor vendor.

Here’s a clever idea: sell accessories and doodads that people at the show will need, like this rack of video and power cables. It’s brilliant, really—you could buy a Commodore 64 at one table and then walk over to 8-Bit classics to buy a matching chroma-luma cable. And when you’re done messing about with your new system, you could kick back and read one of the many books they had for sale about computing history.

Need a hard drive emulator? The BlueSCSI folks were here in full force with all flavors of BlueSCSI to replace your sputtering SCSI hard drives. With some Macs on hand to demonstrate its features they were able to sell almost their entire inventory over the weekend. Not bad!

MacEffects had a shiny new product to present: a transparent RGB mechanical keyboard for the Apple IIc. If you don’t set yours up in an Apple rainbow pattern, then you’re not really living. Their color Mac SE cases were on display, though I wasn’t sure if any were actually for sale. I still marvel at the clarity of the transparent Apple II case—if this same case travels to all the shows, it’s held up really well.

And hey, it’s great to see the TechDungeon folks again after meeting them for the first time at VCF East. Their array of merchandise has expanded considerably, and they had a pile of boxed vintage machines that they sold throughout the weekend.

Joining the more business-like vendors were individuals selling large collections, personal or otherwise. This is where you see the niche and the exotic. If you wanted a NeXTstation, here’s one begging for you to take it to its forever home. Sun pizza boxes were hot and ready for takeout. This is where those flea market comparisons come into play, and this veritable bazaar of computing could easily drain your wallet if you weren’t careful. Make sure to practice your haggling skills ahead of time. You’re dealing with old, used gear, and that comes with all the caveats you’d expect.

Most vendors labeled the machines that were working and ones that needed work. If you’re looking for a bargain, you could save by buying a machine that needs repairs. There were certainly plenty of as-is or project machines for sale. But make sure you know what you’re getting into, as almost all sales are final. If a fixer-upper isn’t your style, you might be more comfortable paying a little more for a machine that’s known to be working. For example, Bonus Life has a guarantee and a warranty on systems that have been serviced and tested.

I noticed fewer tables with bins of random stuff for sale in the main exhibit halls this year, which is a plus in my book. One reason why is that most of this year’s large collections of miscellany weren’t indoors. Because of the high demand for tables, the show staff gave official blessing to set up outside. That meant tables lining the walkway to the main entrance and people selling out of the trunks of their cars. This kept people from wandering the halls trying to sell stuff, which I think is helpful for traffic flow. There weren’t too many parking lot tables, and they largely stuck to areas where their wares wouldn’t block traffic. These folks were also incredibly lucky that the weather was clear and sunny all weekend long. If the show was a week later it would’ve been raining outside and the entire experiment would’ve been scuttled. There’s also the risk of the tragedy of the commons when it comes to parking lot sales. Who determines who gets to set up where? I even saw someone set up an awning, which, well, okay, one is fine, but imagine if a bunch of people started setting up tents or awnings and hijacking adjacent spaces for their makeshift sales? I have to imagine that if the show wants to set up an unofficial outdoor flea market area, the center courtyard would make a great place for it.

After you spent your discretionary dollars at the various vendors, your next stop could be the VCF Midwest Garage Sale, which sells donated items to raise funds for the show. This year’s sale was especially packed, and some bargains could be had if you swung by at the right time. This is a great showing by the community, and I’m sure the show raised thousands of dollars from the generosity of attendees who donated items. There’s only one suggestion I’d make to my fellow donators, and that’s to put a little bit of effort into what you’re giving to the show. Case in point are these old HP Inkjet printers. We had a debate over whether they were uncool or not—we settled on cool due to the fact they had both parallel and serial ports—but damn were they dirty. Considering the effort Mark put into his servers—cleaning them, zeroing out the disks, loading a valid ESXi install, and so forth—the minimum you could do is wipe them down. A little bit of spit shine can go a long way to help the show sell your donations. You do want to raise as much money as you can to benefit VCF, right?

If some of the donations were too cool for the garage sale, they would get set aside for the famous VCF Midwest auction. The downstairs function room was at full capacity as chief organizer Jason Timmons once again donned a getup straight out of a county fair—complete with Stetson hat! But he wasn’t all hat and no cattle, because even when faced with several technical challenges the auction kept a brisk pace. The first challenge was how to present the items to hopeful bidders. Bringing them all downstairs wasn’t practical, so the crew upstairs used cameras to broadcast a video stream of the items up for bids. Everything from Xserves, terminals, and big box games paraded across the big screen next to Jason, and save for a once or twice hiccup on the camera feed this worked like a charm. I didn’t bid on much—I tried for some of the boxed software, but was quickly outbid by other attendees. Even with all the cool stuff on display there wasn’t something that spoke to me personally like that NeXT accessory kit did last year. Don’t worry—the show got my money in other ways.

Last, and of course not least, is the legendary free pile. This year’s free pile was so huge that it was two piles, really—one in its normal home in the hallway corner and another in the outside courtyard. Once again this was possibly only because of good weather—a passing rainstorm would have soaked anything on the open tables. Yet the organizers did the best they could to tame this torrent of generosity. Guesstimating how much will be given away is an impossible task, but I can’t imagine next year’s free pile being any smaller. To my fellow attendees, consider your behavior when taking and leaving items at the free pile. The inside free pile was unable to cope with the number of items and people constantly hovering over it. Sometimes it felt less like a share-alike giveaway and more like vultures picking on corpses. The VCF Midwest rules are pretty sensible, but maybe people aren’t adhering to the spirit of the pile. For instance, don’t bring non-computer stuff. Who leaves a pressure cooker, honestly? Also, to you jerkbenders taking stuff off the table to resell it, shame on you! And for God’s sake, don’t leave stuff behind for the show to dispose of afterwards. You know who you were.

People and Panels

Vendors and exhibitors may get attendees in the door, but what makes them stick around is the crowd itself. I know that’s tautological, but a convention would be a pretty lonely place if you were the only person there. With a dizzying crowd of attendees, exhibitors, guests, and staff, you’re in good company when it comes to old computers. It’s hard not to make new friends and connections with a crowd as big as this one.

VCF Midwest’s a community driven show, and that’s reflected in its panel schedule. Programming an event like this isn’t easy, but VCF Midwest strikes a balance of big crowd-pleasers and niche subjects I’ve never heard of before. Where else can you hear about reverse engineering an online service, or a deeply detailed history of a dead software company? There’s the requisite Youtube personality roundtable, of course, but you’re missing out on some really cool presentations if that’s the only one you see. Ever wondered how a terminal works? Richard Thompson will take you inside old-school HP, DEC, and Beehive models to show you how we interfaced with mainframes and minicomputers. Eric from Eric’s Edge had a whole stack of slides about Hypercard. Ron and Steve served up a sequel to last year’s Mac collecting panel by focusing on PowerBooks and Apple portables. The willingness of the show to let people passionately delve into niche topics is great to see.

Community is also about doing things together, and there were two excellent ways to do that. One was the Build-a-Blinkie tables by the bistro, where you could learn the basics of flux and solder. I saw several complete strangers having a great time learning some DIY skills. They weren’t just building circuit boards, they were building friendships. Same goes for the LAN Party area right next door. A collection of machines from the height of the LANing era running some greatest hits like Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Doom gave attendees the chance to take a fifteen minute break from the hustle and bustle to relax with some gaming. There’s a special feeling you get when fragging folks shoulder-to-shoulder that can’t be replicated online.

But the most powerful connections we can make are one-on-one with other people. Imagine my surprise when Taylor and Amy from their eponymous show pulled me over at their table to talk about the Apple IIe Computers of Significant History. Or chatting about the finer points of my sound card history with Ian Scott of PicoGUS fame. Something that people forget is that everyone behind those social media handles and Twitch streams and YouTube videos are, well, people! Striking up a conversation is the best way to learn about all the stuff you see. The enthusiasm of exhibitors performing live demos or chatting up random passers-by was infectious. Everywhere you looked you saw people forming new connections and building a stronger community.

Another benefit to mingling with people in person is drawing on a vast ocean of expertise that can be hard to replicate online. A prime example is picking the brains of fellow fixers and tinkerers. During the filming of my SE/30 video the display would spontaneously go blank. A reboot would usually bring it back to life, but it eventually stopped booting altogether. I swapped the logic board with my SE and the problem followed, so I could safely rule out the analog board as the culprit. Could I have messed something up when recapping the board? After spending many hours fruitlessly trawling 68KMLA and TinkerDifferent, I couldn’t figure out quite where to go. Poking around with my multimeter was proving fruitless. At that point it was beyond my ability to troubleshoot, so I brought my SE/30 logic board with me on the trip so Mark and I could diagnose the problem together. With his working SE/30 and a spare parts board I was sure we could solve the mystery. After some poking around with a logic probe and the schematics we determined that something was preventing the CPU from starting—we just didn’t know what.

Mark chatted with Adrian Black about theory of operation, while I tossed a few symptoms at Tom from Amiga of Rochester and his tablemate Eric. They had a few ideas, and the first thing they said to troubleshoot was clock generation. Either the crystal was bad or something was faulty with the clock circuit. Check the clock lines to the chips and find the fault. Armed with that advice, we took another crack at the SE/30 board after the show. After some more interrogation of the clock circuit, we found the culprit: a ferrite bead on the bottom of the board. There’s three of them in series, and the middle one—part J13, that little guy right there—was cracked at its input terminal. It looked OK visually, but it lifted right off the board when heat was applied to it. That bad bead broke the circuit providing 5V power to the clock crystal, and without power the oscillator can’t oscillate. No clock means no CPU which means no booting! We replaced the bum bead with one from the parts board and that cured it of its black screen blues.

We had an inkling that it could be a clock problem, but we didn’t know exactly where to look or which chips to probe. Having some experts to point us in the right direction saved us hours of faffing about. Mark posted a complete post-mortem on 68KMLA, just in case if you run into the same issue. We owe many thanks to Tom, who ought to get a medal of commendation for offering advice to anyone who asked while simultaneously fixing paying customers’ boards.

The Vibe

As I was chatting with Nik Chavez of NK-Tek-Fix Retro Market, he made a quip that I thought summed up the entire show. “VCF Midwest? More like VCF Wild West.” He said he couldn’t claim credit for it since he'd heard it from someone else, but this game of telephone rings true. VCF Midwest is capital-C Chaos. Not in the Discord or Jack Garland sense, but in the Muppet Show sense. You never know what you’ll see, and it’s guaranteed to be a good time, but without concerted wrangling by those at the top it would’ve come crashing down.

I’ve tabled at conventions that collapsed because their staff couldn’t handle the pressure or their spending dreams outstripped their budgetary grasp. VCF Midwest isn’t one of those shows—the community shows up not just in person, but with their financial support. The staff is cautious in how they expand the show so as not to overspend. Diversity of both the people attending and the exhibits on display are its greatest strength.

And yet I see VCF Midwest at a crossroads. The past few years have seen such explosive growth because it’s attracting previously untapped audiences. It’s not just local graybeards sitting around reminiscing about the old days. Parents bring their kids to share a piece of their own childhood. Fans come to shake the hands and talk to the hosts of their favorite Youtube channels and podcasts. The numerous vendors create an bazaar so unique that people show up just to shop. The graybeards are still around, but they’ve become elder statesmen who can pass on their knowledge to whole new audiences. This isn't unique to VCF Midwest, but it’s certainly been the beneficiary of prominent figures in the community like LGR consistently returning and using their platform to advertise the show. There’s an almost San Diego Comic Con style air of “I gotta be there, it’s where all the action is!” To their credit, Chicago Classic Computing has embraced this unexpected spotlight wholeheartedly. They understand the kind of responsibility this reputation requires.

The big question is will they be back in Elmhurst again next year? I’m not privy to the show’s financials, so I have no idea what they can afford or what kind of agreements they have in place. But the limitations of the venue have to be on their mind, even if they’re already locked in for next year. The adjustments made for this year have given them enough runway to accommodate some growth. But could the venue absorb another 50% increase in attendance? That’s a valid question. Could the venue support the event five years from now? I’m not sure it could—but that’s assuming current growth trends continue.

I think a good way to blunt some of the demand on tables is to continue emphasizing the main ballroom as exhibitor-oriented space. Take what worked about this years’ changes and extend them further. One way to do it is embracing the flea market reputation and actually organize an outdoor flea market in the central courtyard. Put up one of those big enclosed tents like at a wedding and move the vendors inside along with other traders. Allow people to sell out of the trunks of their cars, but enforce rules like no awnings or tents or occupying adjacent parking spaces. Make sure anyone who wants to do that signs up ahead of time and is assigned a parking space, say, along the north line of spots. Revoke people’s privileges if they behave badly. Take the space gained in the hallways and prioritize it for more exhibitor tables.

I’m sure the staff has plenty of ideas like these to improve the show. I wonder what they could do with just 25% more floorspace, let alone 50. Having some more panel rooms would do wonders, because having more panels balances out the people traffic in the exhibits. Even having more space just for people to walk around would improve the ambiance. You want a show to feel lively, of course, but no one likes feeling like a sardine in a can. When the day finally comes that they have to change venues, I’m confident they’ll handle it well. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve moved, after all.

After the show wrapped up on Sunday, Mark and I surveyed his massive haul of Macs and miscellany, all of which he acquired for somewhere around $350 total. Not bad, considering some of the price tags I saw around the show. After a dinner break we dove right in to working on my SE/30, inspired by the people we met and the spirit of keeping our favorite old computers going. I even got to spend time enjoying some local fun. If you ever come to Chicago, check out American Science Surplus—I bet if they had a table they would’ve done pretty well too.

That’s the fun part of shows like this—the atmosphere energizes you. Talk to any random person at the show and you’ll hear about what an amazing time they had. There’s no such thing as a perfect convention because pleasing everybody is impossible. Someone won’t be able to get a table, or the weekend conflicts with their schedule, or they couldn’t find that incredibly obscure part they wanted to buy. Them’s the breaks, but that’s not a fault of the show itself. People come back to conventions as long as they’re not boring, and VCF Midwest is anything but boring. Its fate rests on the overall health of the vintage computing hobby, which I believe will weather the eventual deflation of its bubble. I look forward to next year and seeing all the new and exciting ways VCF Midwest will grow.

Sun, Surf, and Street Fighter: The World of East Coast Beach Arcades

Don’t you love a good arcade? It’s hard to beat the lights, the sounds, and that adrenaline rush you get when notching a high score. Not all arcades are created equal, though—some are best experienced on a hot summer’s night. Here in Userlandia, we’re taking a vacation to the beachside arcade.

Along the east coast of the United States are numerous towns that live and die by the tidal wave of tourists that crash upon their beaches. Hundreds of hamlets from Rehoboth to Bar Harbor boast beaches and boardwalks guaranteeing a glamorous getaway from the complications of the city. Each one has its own claim to fame, but after visiting enough of them you’ll notice some recurring themes. Candy shops that craft delicious chocolate fudge and sticky saltwater taffy. Amusement parks that feature rides of indeterminable reliability. Gift stores that sell humorous T-shirts of questionable legality. But there’s one place that literally outshines them all: the town arcade.

One particular arcade lies on the rocky coast of southern Maine. In the village of York Beach is a nondescript white building emblazoned with the name Fun-O-Rama. Walk by in the morning when it’s closed and you might mistake it for a warehouse. But there’s no mistaking its purpose when the doors roll up and the light and sound burst forth from its confines and crash over Short Sands beach. It’s hard to imagine a time without Fun-O-Rama’s presence on the beach, but its history dates back to post-World War 2 America. When a bath house on Short Sands Beach was demolished in 1946 the land didn’t stay empty for long. Elmer Laughton, a York local who ran a jukebox and vending machine business, built Skateland on the site in 1946. Beachgoers spent their days rollerskating and enjoying penny arcade amusements. But by the time I first visited in the 1980s Skateland had long given way to Fun-O-Rama.

Fun-O-Rama

Your first impression when walking through the doors is that they don’t make arcades like this anymore. Its wooden floors host over a hundred machines of varying vintages. Everything is powered by good old-fashioned quarters dispensed by machines or—gasp—a human being! After collecting your cup of quarters, the next question is where to spend them. The plentiful players and conglomeration of cabinets might be overwhelming for the first-time visitor. But what appears to be a random arrangement of games is actually organized into a rather reasonable layout.

One corner is dedicated to sit-down driving games. Whether it’s cars, motorcycles, semi-trucks, or white-water rafting, there’s enough multiplayer options to satisfy everyone with a need for speed. Next to that is pinball row, featuring some classic tables like South Park, The Addams Family, Star Wars, and Theater of Magic. Walk past the ticket counter and into the back half and you’ll find rows of classic video game cabinets. Dig Dug, Asteroids, Ms. Pac-Man, oh my! Opposite those cabinets are games of chance, which let you risk your quarters for tickets or prizes. Oh, and there’s Skee-Ball too, because of course there’s Skee-Ball.

One credit for a 1980s video game costs a very 1980s price of one quarter. If you’re a Scrooge McDuck type looking for maximum play time for minimum money, you’ll want to check out the pinball tables. While a single game costs fifty cents, you can get three games for a dollar. That’s probably the best bang-for-buck in the building. The more modern video games ask for a dollar or more.

If you’ve never been to a beach arcade before, it’s easy to get sucked in by all the blinking, bleeping, and blooping. Games are packed together tightly to amplify their audiovisual assault on the senses. Nostalgic millennials team up to fight Mr. Burns in Konami’s Simpsons Arcade. Grizzled pinball gladiators bust bumpers and pull plungers for the glory of netting the next high score. Kids race from machine to machine, eager to try something new or win a bunch of tickets. And when they’re all done, they can step right up to the prize counter to trade in their tickets for the toy of their dreams. Or—let’s be honest—a few pieces of candy and some fake teeth.

Something Fun-O-Rama shares with its beach town brethren is a sense of history. Peppered throughout are connections to the penny arcades of old: the fortune tellers, the love testers, the finicky games that ask you to hit a moving target with a quarter to win tickets. Attractions like the clown face shooting gallery add a carnival vibe to the experience. Too many video arcades leaned into the space age whiz kids aesthetic during the video game boom years. Beach arcades might have adopted the new technology of the eighties, but their aesthetics are firmly rooted in the bustling boardwalks of the twentieth century.

Kids don’t care about ambiance and aesthetics, though. Kid me certainly didn’t; I was caught up in the excitement of winning tickets, or playing the newest game, or scoring a hundred-point shot in Skee-Ball. I eventually realized the cold, hard economics of tickets—there was no way I could rack up the thousands necessary for a big Lego set or portable TV. So I turned my attention to video games, and my family’s annual pilgrimage to York was a chance to experience the newest slate of arcade arrivals. I may have wised up to the ticket trap, but I had another harsh economic lesson to learn: what goes up must come down.

Despite Fun-O-Rama’s guaranteed beachfront crowd it wasn’t immune to the economic realities facing arcades. The purchase price of arcade video games in the 1990s rose in lockstep with their increasing graphical fidelity and mechanical complexity. These more expensive machines demanded more quarters, which meant less repeat plays. Rapid advancements in home video game consoles and PC gaming made them competitive with arcade graphics and sound. Rising capital costs and faltering revenues spelled game over for many arcades after the turn of the millennium. Northeast beach arcades had the same capital cost conundrum, but faced different customer challenges. Yes, they had a guaranteed stream of summer tourists, but their doors were only open for five, maybe six months of the year. And trips to the beach are some of the first things to get cut from family budgets when a recession rolls in.

By the aughts the era of multiple new games every summer at Fun-O-Rama were long gone. Now you’re lucky to get one new headline game every other year. For a while these were of the flashy ticket-dispensing or prize-withholding variety, but real games are making a comeback. The newest machines are Jurassic Park Arcade and Minecraft Dungeons, which are state of the art. But they’re also very expensive. How about showing the pinball fans some love by adding a table made, in, oh, the last decade or two?

I’d wager that about half of the machines in this fine establishment have been here since I was a kid. The Skee-Ball and Killer Klowns From Outer Space might even date back to the Skateland era. All the classic video game cabinets are survivors from the days when they were front and center. Most of the vehicle games have been parked in their corner since the 1990s. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is probably the newest fighting game in the whole joint, with nary a peep from modern entrants like Street Fighter V. I rarely see anyone playing the old-fashioned games of chance, and honestly that was true twenty or thirty years ago.

Another hangover of the arcade malaise era are the large and complex full-motion machines. The Afterburners and sit-down Spy Hunters are long gone, of course, but the husks of Star Trek: Voyager and Super Alpine Racer are forsaken in the boneyard. I’m pretty sure the Cedar Point rollercoaster simulator hasn’t worked in over a decade. No one in the northeast even knows what Cedar Point is, so it’s no surprise that it hasn’t been fixed. But to leave it non-functional in the middle of prime floor real estate has always struck me as strange. Maybe it’s simply too heavy to evict.

Now, I’m not asking for Fun-O-Rama to turn over its inventory over every year or ditch perfectly functional classic machines. The rows of vintage pinball and video games are what separates places like this from Dave and Buster’s. Without the “Hey, I remember that” factor, these establishments lose a lot of their character. But the reality of classic games is that their risk of failure is higher. To Fun-O-Rama’s credit, the number of machines on the floor that are completely out of order are pretty low. Machines that are D-E-D dead are relegated to the boneyard in the back. They have a repair room and a technician to service machines in-house. But one can’t help from noticing the staffers frequently helping people with machines that eat their quarters. Sticky bumpers or misfiring mechanical features drain the fun out of pinball. Dead monitors put the brakes on multiplayer racing games. Maybe one of the Time Crisis guns doesn’t work, or the sniper sight in Silent Scope is on the fritz. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying an apparently working machine only to find it broken in some way.

Now, I’m aware that no arcade bats a thousand when it comes to functioning machines. This is especially true of classic games, where dwindling part supplies are a real concern. And I’ve seen machines that were out of order in June be restored to a working state in July. But the fact that most of these mechanically and electrically complex machines are generally working in spite of abuse from kids and tourists is a feat on its own. Fun-O-Rama isn’t an arcade museum, and your expectations must be set accordingly.

Truthfully, it’s not Fun-O-Rama that’s changed—I’ve changed. I know way more about the business of arcades now than I did thirty years ago. I eventually visited other beach arcades in Wells, Ogunquit, Hampton Beach, and Bar Harbor. They all shared a certain level of dankness; a kind of funhouse energy that inland arcades lacked. So even though they shared common elements like video games, pinball, and ticket counters, they also had unique reasons to visit one instead of another. The arcade is just another expression of the similar but different nature of the beach towns that host them. York Beach has Nubble Light, the Goldenrod, and Long Sands Beach but Old Orchard Beach has the Portland Headlight, Dickinsons, and… Old Orchard Beach. So it’s no surprise that there’s Fun-O-Rama to face off against Palace Playland.

Knowing about the business of arcades also means I can appreciate Fun-O-Rama on its own terms. Let’s be real: the sun and surf are the primary reason to go to a beach town. Arcade games are just a bonus. If I want to visit a destination arcade, I’d go out of my way to places like the American Classic Arcade Museum in Laconia, New Hampshire or Pastime Pinball in Manchester, Vermont. While kids are allowed inside, they’re not for children. They’ve got more games, a nicer presentation, and they don’t operate like an all-ages casino. If what you’re after is a hardcore arcade experience, those places are more your style.

Fun-O-Rama isn’t here to be the ultra-serious arcade experience for the discerning gamer, and that’s OK. I’ve caught myself griping about how “it’s not how it used to be,” but that’s only from one perspective. In the eighties, the video games and amusements took my money in exchange for fleeting entertainment. Thirty-odd years later, is it really any different? The beach arcade is a cultural signifier; a signpost for fun. It’s all part of a beach town’s charming illusion that this is the way life should be. So mash those buttons, get that high score, and forget about your troubles for a while. What you’re buying with a Dixie cup of quarters isn’t a few rounds of Galaga; you’re buying memories. Whether you’re a kid making them or an adult reliving them, you’ll cherish every one.

The Macintosh SE/30 - Computer Hall of Fame

They say never meet your heroes, but every once in a while they live up to the hype. Here in Userlandia, let’s welcome the first inductee to the Computer Hall of Fame: The Macintosh SE/30.

It’s rare these days to find a computer that expresses some kind of philosophy. One example is Framework, whose primary design focus is upgradability and repairability. Compare that to a sea of lookalike and workalike laptops from competitors who can’t articulate why you should buy their machines over another’s except for price. Of course, there’s another manufacturer that makes computers with some kind of guiding philosophy, and that’s the trillion dollar titan: Apple. You might say said philosophy is “more money for us,” and you wouldn’t be wrong! But on a product level, there’s still some Jobsian “Think Different” idealism at Apple Park. To wit, the rainbow-colored M1 iMac still channels the soul of its classic introductory commercial narrated by Jeff Goldblum—“Step one: Plug in. Step two: Get Connected. Step Three… there is no step three.”

2024 will mark the fortieth anniversary of the Macintosh. Not just the Macintosh as a platform, mind you, but the fortieth anniversary of the all-in-one Macintosh. Today’s iMac is vastly more powerful than the original 128K, but both of their built-in displays say Hello in Susan Kare’s iconic script. Another thing they have in common is a love-it-or-hate-it reaction to the all-in-one form factor. A compact Mac, for all its foibles and flaws, sparked something in people. It had personality. But while the Mac was fun and whimsical and revolutionary, something always held it back. Even die-hard fans couldn’t ignore its insufficient memory or inadequate storage, let alone its lack of expansion. Apple crossed off these limitations one by one with the 512k, Mac Plus, and SE.

Only one limitation remained, and that was performance. Inside the SE was the same 68000 CPU found in the original Mac. Sure, it was slightly faster thanks to slightly speedier memory, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy Mac users who wanted a more powerful Mac without spending five and a half grand on a Macintosh II. They turned to third party upgrades like DayStar Digital’s accelerator boards to give their Macs a turbo boost, and Apple took notice. Why leave that money to a third party when they could take it up front?

Apple announced an upgraded SE on January 19, 1989: the SE/30. This upgrade didn’t come cheap—the SE/30’s suggested retail price of $4,369 was a considerable premium over a vanilla SE. But underneath a nearly identical skin was a brand new logic board based on the range-topping Mac IIx. With a 16MHz 68030 processor and 68882 floating point unit, the SE/30 crammed phenomenal computing power into an itty-bitty chassis space. It’s a rare example of Apple actually giving some users what they wanted. An SE/30 could be a writing buddy, a QuarkXPress workstation, an A/UX server, or even a guest role in Seinfeld as Jerry’s computer.

Although I missed the SE/30’s heyday, I experienced it after the fact through books, magazines, and websites. The argument that the SE/30 is the best version of what Steve Jobs put on the stage in 1984 is a persuasive one. Prominent Mac writers like John Siracusa and Adam Engst proclaim the SE/30 as their favorite Mac of all time. They’re joined by decades of Usenet and forum posts from people all over the globe who love this little powerhouse. All this praise has inflated prices on vintage SE/30s, even ones in questionable condition. So when I was given the opportunity to pick one up, complete in box, for free? Now that’s an offer I couldn’t refuse.

One Person’s Mac is Another Person’s Treasure

You never know what treasure’s buried in somebody’s basement. Back in September I was at a work function catching up with a colleague, and I mentioned my trip to VCF Midwest. “Oh, I didn’t know you collected old computers,” he said. “I’ve got an old Mac from the 90s in my basement. It was my aunt’s, and she barely used it. It’s still in the box. Do you want it?” Do I?! Of course I wanted it! A day later he sent me some photos of the box, and I couldn’t believe what I saw: it was an SE/30! It was like somebody told me I could take a low mileage Corvette from their barn. I stopped by his house the following Saturday and picked up the SE/30, an Apple Extended Keyboard 1, and an ImageWriter II all still in their boxes. I couldn’t in good conscience take all this for free, so I gave him one of my vintage Mamiya film camera kits and a case of beer in return.

I’d love to tell you that I brought this Mac home, took it out of the box, powered it on to a Happy Mac, and partied like it was 1989. But you and I both know that’s not how this works. Schrödinger’s Mac might have succumbed to a multitude of maladies during its many years in the box. Even new old stock or barely used gear suffers from aging components, because a box isn’t a magical force field that halts the passage of time. SE/30s are notorious for using explosive Maxell batteries. Surface-mount capacitors have the capacity to leak their corrosive electrolyte all over the logic board. Spindles and heads inside the mechanical hard drive could be seized in place. The only way to know for sure was to open the stasis chamber and bring this Mac out of hibernation.

Outside the box was a shipping label that said this machine was sold by the New York University bookstore, which was one of Apple’s pilot universities for selling Macs to students and teachers. Inside the box is the SE/30 along with a complete set of manuals, some software, and a mouse. Up first is the open me first packet, containing the system software and tour disks. Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard comes standard for your stack-building pleasure. All the manuals and extras are there too, like the QuickStart guide, quick reference sheet, Apple stickers, and even the “Thanks for buying a Mac” insert. There’s even a a bonus copy of Microsoft Word.

Fully recapped board

Manuals and accessories are nice, but what you really want to see is the Mac itself. This SE/30’s case looks pretty good for a computer old enough to have a midlife crisis. The keyboard and mouse have yellowed a bit more, but it’s nothing a retrobrite couldn’t fix. But how it looked outside mattered less than how it looked on the inside. I cracked open the case to inspect the condition of the logic board. The intact purple Tadiran PRAM battery exhibited no signs of leakage—phew! A light coating of crud clung to the capacitors, which meant a recap job was in order. Barely any dust covered the boards and cables, and the CRT had none of that notorious black soot. The analog board capacitors showed no signs of bulging or leaking. Honestly, this is really good condition for an unmaintained machine of this age. I thought my odds of a successful power-on test were very good. I plugged the board back into the Mac and turned it on. Unfortunately, it powered on with a garbled screen colloquially known as simasimac. This condition could happen for a variety of reasons, but the prime suspect was those cruddy capacitors. After a date with a soldering iron and some tantalum caps, the newly recapped board was ready for another test. I flipped the switch and got a familiar bong—now this Mac is a Happy Mac. Success!

Maximizing My Macintosh

While the recap brought the SE/30 back to life, it wasn’t ready to head back into action just yet. This machine was a bone-stock configuration, and it would need some upgrades to unleash its full potential. My coworker’s parent’s sibling’s former Macintosh came equipped with 1MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. That was Apple’s mid-range config for the SE/30, but one megabyte of memory was a bit stingy for a machine that cost over four grand in 1989. The 40MB SCSI hard drive was more appropriate for its price, and I wouldn’t mind keeping it if it worked. Alas, I couldn’t rouse it from its decades-long slumber. Thankfully, both of these problems are easy to solve for the modern vintage Mac owner.

Mass storage was first in the lineup, because the hard drive was ding-dong-dead. I needed a better solution than another SCSI hard drive—even if found a compatible drive, it’d just as likely to die as this one. I turned to the current champion of modern retro storage: BlueSCSI. The external DB-25 model is an okay solution, but an SE/30 deserves internal storage. I could have mounted it on the same bracket used by the internal hard drive, but that would mean cracking open the case every time I needed to put something on the SD card. The solution is PotatoFi’s 3D printable PDS slot bracket. Now I can access the SD card from outside the case and even see the BlueSCSI’s status LEDs. Brilliant!

Batting second was RAM. An SE/30 can address a maximum of 128MB of RAM when all eight memory slots are populated with 16MB SIMMs. This stood as the record for the maximum memory inside an all-in-one Mac until the Power Mac 5400 in 1996. Few users actually took advantage of that high ceiling because 16MB SIMMs took a long time to come to market, and when they did, they were outrageously expensive. Nowadays they’re cheap as chips, as my British friends like to say. There’s plenty of eBay shops selling 64 and 128 meg kits for $50 and $100, respectively. Or you can get them from Other World Computing for a similar price. 128MB felt like overkill, so I bought a 64MB kit and saved the difference.

RAM

I snapped four new SIMMs into four empty slots and flipped the power switch. The Mac booted up to the desktop and About This Macintosh displayed a total of 65MB. Hooray! But—there’s always a but with old computers—there’s more to the memory story. Many old Macs, including the SE/30, run a memory test on a cold boot. Stuffing your SE/30 full of RAM will have a significant impact on the duration of this test. A maxed out SE/30 can take a minute or two to go from power on to Welcome to Macintosh, and a 64 meg system takes half as much. But that’s not the only caveat for large amounts of memory. The SE/30, along with the II, IIx, and IIcx have a dirty secret—a 24-bit dirty secret.

Have you ever thought about what defines the bit-ness of a CPU? If I polled the average retro computer enthusiast as to how many “bits” are in the Motorola 68000 CPU inside their Amiga 500, Atari ST, or Mac SE, they’d likely answer “16-bit.” Sega used the 68000 in the Genesis and advertised it as a 16-bit system. And they’re not wrong, but they’re not completely right either. To understand how Apple’s ROMs got so dirty, we have to understand the development of the 68000.

The year is 1976, and Motorola Semiconductor was in a heap of trouble. Sales of their 8-bit 6800 microprocessor were slumping due to stiff competition from the likes of the 6502, Z80, and 8080. Meanwhile, Intel’s marketshare was soaring thanks to their advancements in silicon fabrication. They were already designing a new 16-bit CPU, the 8086, that would leapfrog the 8-bit competition. Now Motorola’s plans to reinvigorate its flagging CPU sales were at a crossroads. They could rush a me-too 16-bit product to market, but it wouldn’t be able to beat Intel on price or performance. Having determined that fighting Intel head-on was a losing bet, Moto would zig where Intel had zagged.

Motorola 68000 in Mac SE

Colin Crook, Tom Gunter, and the 68K team decided that a 32-bit instruction set would be a way to future-proof their design while offering something Intel wasn’t. There was only problem with this clever idea: economically packaging all the support circuitry for a full 32-bit CPU wasn’t yet possible. A dual-inline package CPU with more than 64 pins was costly both in manufacturing and in board real estate. So how could they keep an eye on the future while utilizing then-current tech?

Motorola’s solution was implementing the 32-bit 68K instruction set with 16-bit components. The CPU has 32-bit registers, a 32-bit memory model, and 32-bit data types, but it also offers 16 and 8-bit data types. Only 24 of the 32 address lines are connected to memory, and the data bus and arithmetic logic unit are 16-bit. This let the CPU use those common 64-pin DIP chips. Most programs used the 8- and 16-bit instructions, with 32-bit operations possible if you were okay with reduced performance. This forward-thinking architecture made it easy for Motorola to design a full 32-bit chip, unlike Intel who needed to work around a lot of cruft when designing the 386. 68K software would be forward compatible with Motorola’s eventual full 32-bit chip, so long as you didn’t do anything foolish like hijack the unused high-order memory address bits for non-addressing purposes.

Unfortunately Andy Hertzfeld did exactly that when he designed Mac OS’ lockable and purgeable memory flags, to his later regret. The memory pointer had room for all 32 bits, but only 24 were actually used because only 24 physical memory address lines were available on the CPU package. Exploiting this seemed like a good idea at the time; those eight bits weren't doing anything and it’d be an efficient use of limited resources. But that quest for efficiency in the present mortgaged their future, and the bill came due when Apple shipped Macs with 32-bit 68020 and 68030 CPUs. These 24-bit dirty Macs couldn’t address more than 8MB of RAM unless you used A/UX.

Apple fixed this memory malady by including new 32-bit clean ROMs in Macs beginning with the IIci. Application developers also had to fix their apps to avoid touching those memory address bits. Owners of the II, IIx, IIcx, and SE/30 expected Apple to offer a ROM upgrade to unleash their systems’ full potential, but Apple never did. Most users back in the day fixed this limitation by installing a 32-bit patch extension like MODE32 or Apple’s 32-bit Enabler. If you were lucky to find a spare Mac IIsi ROM SIMM, you could install that into your SE/30 and have a truly 32-bit clean compact Mac. But those ROMs were hard to find back then and are even rarer today.

Instead of stealing Peter’s ROMs to fix Paul’s Macs, the community has developed new hardware to clean up Apple’s dirty laundry. I procured a Big Mess O’ Wires ROMinator II, which is one of several modern Macintosh ROM SIMMs. It’s not only 32-bit clean, it also eliminates the memory test, adds a ROM disk, and a few other features. I’m not sure how I feel about the pirate icon and the new startup chime, but I admit it gives the Mac a little more character. If you don’t care for the frills, a GGLabs MACSIMM or a PurpleROM will get you 32-bit cleanliness and a ROM disk for a lower price. Honestly, running Mac OS 7.6 and later on these machines without an accelerator is probably a bad idea. I’m sticking to System 7.5 and earlier.

After the repairs and upgrades, the SE/30 was ready for a test drive. I wrangled words in Microsoft Word, slummed around in SimCity, and floated with AfterDark’s flying toasters. Apple claimed the SE/30 was four times faster than a vanilla SE and it sure feels that way. My past experiences with a Plus, SE, or Classic left me wanting because applications always felt a little slow. Not so with the SE/30—its responsiveness, especially with solid state storage, was excellent. I had to admit I was falling for the SE/30’s charms. I get it now. It’s not just hype or nostalgia—this was the compact Macintosh as it was meant to be, without compromises or excuses. So why did Apple kill it?

SE/30/30 Hindsight

Apple discontinued the SE/30 on October 23, 1991. Its replacement, if you could call it that, was the Classic II. The headline specs for the Classic II sound like an SE/30 in a cheaper package. It had a 16MHz 68030 CPU, 2MB of RAM, and a 40MB hard drive all for the low cost of $1900. Sounds like a good deal, so what’s the catch? While the Classic II’s 68030 ran at the same clock speed as an SE/30, it was hobbled by a 16-bit external data bus, making it 30% slower than an SE/30. Floating point calculations are even slower because the FPU was now an optional add-on. Two, its maximum RAM was cut down to 10MB—a fraction of the SE/30’s 128MB. Three, the versatile PDS slot was replaced with a more limited connector for that optional FPU. All these changes combined to make the Classic II more of an entry level appliance and less of a power user’s machine. SE/30 fans were understandably upset; they wanted an upgrade. Why would Apple kill a beloved Mac like the SE/30 without offering a true successor?

A lot changed at Apple from 1989 to 1991. Jean-Louis Gassée—Apple’s product man responsible for high-cost, high-powered Macs like the IIfx and the Mac Portable—left the company in 1990. CEO John Sculley and newly promoted COO Michael Spindler delivered new marching orders to Apple’s engineers: build less expensive computers to grow Apple’s marketshare. From that standpoint the Classic II was a smashing success. The SE/30’s copious component count made it a prime target for a cost-reduced revision. The Classic II’s highly integrated logic board had 60% fewer chips than the SE/30’s, making the Classic II considerably cheaper to manufacture while maintaining a healthy margin. The street price for an SE/30 with 4MB RAM and 80MB hard drive in 1991 was $2800. A Classic II with the same specs was $2400, and one year later Apple’s retail partners would sell the same machine as a Performa 200 for $1200. Slashing the maximum memory and removing the PDS slot pushed power users to more expensive Macs instead of buying a Classic II and hot-rodding it.

The Color Classic wasn’t the upgrade SE/30 owners were looking for.

By 1993 the black-and-white Mac was looking pretty dated in a world of Super VGA graphics. It had been four years since the announcement of the SE/30, and its fans picked up on rumors of an upcoming all-in-one color Mac. Surely this time will be different and they’d get the upgrade of their dreams. And when the Macintosh Color Classic was announced, it looked it might be the one! It came in a brand new case featuring Apple’s curvaceous Espresso design language and a glorious ultra color Sony Trinitron display. Apple even brought back the PDS slot! But wait—further down on the spec sheet was the same old and slow 16MHz 030 hampered by a 16-bit data bus. And a maximum of 10MB of RAM, again? It’s not different at all, is it, Steve?!

Apple soon realized their mistake and launched the Color Classic II a few months later with a 33MHz 030 and a full 32-bit data bus. Now this was a true upgrade for most SE/30 users, but Apple didn’t sell them in the USA. Too bad, so sad. Apple was descending into its beleaguered era, when prospective Mac buyers had to choose between the dizzying array of Centrises, Quadras, Performas, or whatever Apple’s roulette wheel said they should name their computers on any given day.

But wait—you’re a discerning power user with an SE/30 on their desk. Why should you spend multiple thousands on a new Mac when you could spend multiple hundreds on an accelerator instead? DayStar Digital’s Turbo 040 sold for about $1500 in 1993. As long as you were still okay with monochrome video, this card gave your little Mac enough power to trade blows with the reigning heavyweight champion, the Quadra 950 tower. And if you weren’t okay with monochrome video, Micron’s XCeed brought multiple shades of gray to the SE/30’s display. Color graphics cards were available too. A determined user could hack together an accelerator, graphics card, and network card into this tiny package and keep it going until the PowerPC transition finally made them cry uncle and buy a new Mac.

Apple’s power users have been remarkably loyal to the Mac through some pretty tough times. Not necessarily loyal to Apple, mind you—I have a hunch that the kind of people who owned SE/30s bought Mac clones. But these people stuck with the Mac through the beleaguered era, eventually becoming the bloggers and podcasters who filled the vacuum left by the death of Macworld, MacUser, and MacAddict. Whenever there’s a new Mac announcement I always sense this undercurrent from their coverage that “if only Apple made a computer tailored to my specific needs, it would be the best computer ever! Just like the SE/30, and the Cube, and the G4 towers!” But like it or not, the Macintosh and Apple are no longer the underdog who’s too cool for school. You’d think they’d be happy, because Apple finally won and took over the world, but they can’t be happy because Apple lost their counterculture joie de vive in the process.

Macintosh SE/30 on desk

The SE/30 Abides.

I understand why so many former SE/30 owners have been chasing that machine’s ideal for decades. Perhaps it’s an impossible standard to live up to and their idea of the Perfect Mac can never actually be realized. After all, the SE/30 had its share of shortcomings. But in the context of the overall package they were minor inconveniences. It’s no surprise that it found an audience with college students, writers, and designers who appreciated aesthetics and the value of the overall package while appreciating its technical prowess. If I had one at the time, I would’ve appreciated it too. Sometimes when you meet a hero, you’ve actually met the real deal.