24 Jul
2011
24 Jul
'11
10:25 a.m.
On 24 Jul 2011 at 9:58, Guy Sotomayor wrote:
Having been at IBM and working on the PS/2 series of
systems, I can
tell you that the PS/2 systems were first with the Pentiums from IBM.
In particular the PS/2 Model 95 was the first. It was also the first
PS/2 to support > 16MB of RAM (I know 'cause I did the support in AIX
PS/2 for it...was fun having a 64MB system at the time...8 8MB DIMMs).
It was *well* before 1995 (as I moved to Austin in 1995 and hadn't
been working on PS/2 stuff for at least 2-3 years before that). The
ISA based machines (of which the PC330 was) came later.
So, was the Pentium you used in the 95 a P24T? I'm just trying to
get a handle on the order of things. The PS/2 guide:
http://www.lenovo.com/psref/pdf/ps2book.pdf
seems to say that all PS/2s used the P24T CPU, whose "official" Intel
release date was in 1995, whereas the original P5 Pentium was
available in 1993.
I tried to find a 1994 annoucement by IBM that the Pentium was
available on the PS/2, but no luck.
I don't doubt that you had early access to the Pentium CPUs at IBM,
but that doesn't quite settle the issue. We were fooling with pre-
release steppings of the 80286 when IBM was shipping 64K 5150s with
the 8088.
--Chuck