What to Do with a PS/2?

[Jules Richardson]

On 01/25/2016 12:29 AM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
> To my surprise, I found something just barely old enough to interest me
> on the e-waste pile at work: An IBM PS/2 85 from around 1993 or so.

Neat. Likewise here, I found a 65sx a couple of years ago and it's just 
quirky and old enough to keep around. Surprisingly the right mouse for it 
turned up a short while after, and then I found a period model M around 6 
months ago.

> The machine has 12M of parity RAM, with one SIMM slot pair still open.

If you ever find any surplus RAM, shout - my system had 6M, but 4 of that 
is snafu, and it could really use a little more.

> I replaced the CMOS battery (conveniently, a CR2032 coin cell, available
> at the local supermarket)

Lucky. Mine head a dead Dallas chip which I had to attack with a dremel to 
expose the battery connections. Oh, and a ton of gloopy, decaying black 
foam sound-deadening / baffle material.

> OS/2 2.0 would probably be more appropriate for this machine, but I
 > don't have it.

I was hopeful that mine would, but sadly not - just an MS-DOS system. It 
does have a copy of Micro CADAM on there, which I expect was what it spent 
its life running.

> And now that it is cleaned up and working, I have no clue about what to
> do with it!

Mine just kind of sits around in case I ever *need* an MCA-bus system for 
some oddball reason. The copy of CADAM on it is vaguely interesting, but 
the UI isn't exactly intuitive and without documentation it's difficult to 
make it do anything.

cheers

Jules