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Desktops and mini PCs

IBM PS/2

8owners with an opinion
50%of verdicts positive
2/3positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and design; criticized for value and display.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like it
Minor nitpick - the Bernoulli 90 MB removable disk was released in 1991. The Bernoulli 44 MB was late 80s. I liked them a lot better than the SyQuest drives with their hard platters which seemed much more failure prone. I still have a stack of 90 and 150 MB disks and a couple 150 MB drives. They were considerably faster than the internal 20 MB ESDI drives in the IBM PS/2 systems I backed up. I saved a stack of the classic IBM keyboards when we decommissioned all that stuff. Still using them too.
Likes it
I taught myself Turbo Pascal on a friend's IBM PS/2 P75 [1] around 1990, also a briefcase-style luggable that came out a couple of years after this one. The P75 had a delightful orange plasma screen, and the keyboard was wired and could be unhooked from the case, and since it was a 486 chip, it could all of DOS, OS/2, and Windows (and apparently it was able to run Windows 95 when that came out). My main machine at the time was the Amiga 500, and the PS/2 felt like a step down in terms of graphics and so on, but Turbo Pascal was just too magical for me to care. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2_portable_computers
Doesn’t like it
Nice one. That's the year before I bought my first. I thought it was a superb deal up against things like the Amiga and ST, because it was much faster and more capable for a hobby programmer. And in the first job I had, my 2nd hand A310 cost £800. It had 1MB RAM, a 20MB hard disk, and a colour monitor. So probably half its new price. The fastest machine that the VAR I worked for offered was an IBM PS/2 Model 70-A21: http://www.walshcomptech.com/ps2/70A21.htm A 25MHz 80386DX with a tiny L1 cache on the daughterboard. Our demo one had a 80387DX and 2MB of RAM and a 120MB HDD, the first 3.5" HDD I ever saw. It retailed at about £10,000 for the base model, without "optional" extras like keyboard, DOS, or a monitor. Tricked out like the display one with an 8514 XGA display, something like £15,000 or £16,000. I tested it. My Archimedes was 4x to 8x faster in integer benchmarks. And it had a GUI -- the PS/2 didn't, this was before Windows 3.0 -- and it multitasked, which the PS/2 also didn't. Overpriced my left kidney. It had astonishing industry-beating price:performance. It stomped all over the fastest x86 kit in the world: it ran a usable pure-software emulation of an x86 PC on which I could run work apps.
Likes it
I used GeoWorks on my used IBM PS/2 286 PC in like 1992. It ran off a single AOL floppy. It was honestly amazing to see my "ancient" DOS based computer suddenly displaying a Windows-like GUI. It really seemed like magic. It was also pretty much the only time I used a mouse on that machine, since everything else was DOS.
Neutral
This has been true for me--I have paid around that twice in the 90s. Once for an IBM PS/2 Model 77 40MB 486DX2 66MHz, NEC 5fg monitor, rare Microchannel SoundBlaster-compatible card. And again for a kitted-out Toshiba Protoge CT-320 48MB 10.4" 1024x600, dock, PC Card network + SCSI. Before that I got a PC clone 386-33MHz 8MB with sram cache, overclocked 11MHz ISA bus, ATI graphics card to run OS/2 1.3. It was awesome and my first professional grade development machine. It wasn't all that much ~$2k. I can't say that it's true for me now. Maybe if I included a high-end GPU for ML. Now I'd rather have multiple machines for purposes: development, gaming/VR, super portable (Surface Go).