IBM PS/1 Consultant Model 2133

 Notes on IBM PS/1 Consultant Model 2133

I’m not sure where I got this machine. Maybe at the landfill/transfer station. Anyway, I have a few IBM machines in my collection and this PS/1 will fit nicely with the rest of my DOS boxes.

I recently was working on setting up an XT-286 Model 5162 and then a KLH 286-12. Both of these 286’s were challenging and I had difficulty setting up a hard disk on both the XT-286 and the 286-12. I also struggled to set up a sound card on the 286-12. But I did eventually figure those machines out and I have DOS 3.3 on the XT-286 and DR-DOS 7.03 and NC on the 286-12. I decided to see what I could set up on the PS/1, which was the next generation, the 386sx-25.

At first I thought I would try DOS 4.01 since this is what came with the machine originally. But while looking for a copy of DOS 4.01 I found some copies of OS/2. I’ve wanted to try out OS/2 for a while now but had so far been unsuccessful in getting it installed. I own a boxed copy of OS/2 for Windows but there seems to be something wrong with the install disk and it won’t properly read and start the install. I put it on the back burner months ago. Well, I downloaded the OS/2 files and created the 20 installation floppies on 3.5” 1.44 disks. I figured this PS/1 would be a good test bed for my first OS/2 since it was genuine IBM equipment and of the same vintage as the PS/2 machines that OS/2 was shipping with.

Before I attempted to install OS/2 I had to install a floppy drive and a hard drive. I also installed a CD-ROM drive on the same IDE cable as the hard drive, the HD as master and the CD-ROM as the slave. I booted it up and the floppy worked and the hard drive was recognized but not working. I installed DOS 5.0 and used FDISK to fix the hard disk MBR and formatted it for DOS. It worked. I now had the PS/1 working with DOS 5.0 and I also installed Windows 3.1. Next was to try installing OS/2.

The OS/2 install files I downloaded were for version 2.11. This version has DOS and Windows 3.1 built into the OS/2 system. I did not at first understand this and chose to keep DOS and Windows on the hard drive and installed OS/2 on the same hard drive. It took awhile to install and there were 13 floppy disks for the install and about 6 or 7 more disks for optional setups. Eventually I got the OS/2 system to boot and started looking around.

I was able to launch some DOS programs I had on the hard drive, such as Norton Commander and Laplink. And I was able to launch the Windows File Manager and the control panel. I did some reading since I was confused about how OS/2 used DOS and Windows. I figured out that OS/2 does not need either DOS or Windows installed since it comes with it’s own copy of DOS and Windows. Keeping my previous DOS and Windows installs was not necessary. I ended up deleting the Windows folder but I kept the DOS folder, for now. I tested the system and it works the same as it did before I deleted the Windows folder. Deleting the unneeded Windows saved me some hard drive space.

Next, I tried installing a sound card and the CD-ROM drivers. This turned out to be not so easy. The sound card is supposed to be supported but so far I have not had any sound. And the CD-ROM is not recognized.

I found out that in order to use sound and the CD-ROM I needed to install the Multimedia Presentation Manager, which is on two of the diskettes that were not used when I did the original install. So, I put in the first diskette and started MINSTALL.EXE. This ran the installation routine for the sound card and CD-ROM. I chose the SoundBlaster16 and the Creative CD-ROM. The install finished and I rebooted. But all I got was an error message and no sound or CD.

Needed to do more reading. I did try to replace the sound card driver with a Vibra16 version. I did get the board to post to the screen but I got the same error message about the drivers being launched from CONFIG.SYS. And I installed a CD-ROM driver from diskette. But I still don’t have any sound or CD. More reading.

I didn’t log everything but I did manage to get sound and the CD-ROM working. But the CD-ROM is flakey, it doesn’t like to read all discs. It reads some and it does seem to read Audio discs alright. The sound from the CD does not go through the system but I can plug in to the headphone port of the CD player and listen to the audio CD.

There is no ethernet card on this machine so it is not connected to the LAN. If I want I can use LapLink in DOS through either a parallel or serial cable to the Gateway 2000 4DX2-66.

The video card does not display with enough brightness in DOS, but it is okay in the OS/2 GUI. The screen is a little dark on it’s own but I did notice that the screen is fine when used with the Gateway 2000.