[ Retro Scan ] Dogs and Families Love IBM PS/1
March 1st, 2016 by Benj Edwards
Now you’ll have more time to spend with your dog
I’ve previously featured a later-model IBM PS/1 that also happened to be my brother’s college computer, circa ’94. But here we see an ad for an early — if not the first — model of the PS/1. This is back when PS/1 systems had the OS and a nifty mouse-based GUI program launcher built into ROM. They also shipped with Prodigy on the hard disk. I’m starting to really want one of these for my collection.
Discussion Topic: Has a pet ever done damage to your computer or game system? Tell us about it.
March 1st, 2016 at 3:25 pm
I think my high school had some of these – 1991 would be about the right time frame. I remember them being quite nice looking compared to the generic beige boxes of the day.
March 1st, 2016 at 7:18 pm
The worst computer damage I ever experienced was about 8 years ago. I had just poured a glass of wine. (My first of the evening – I hadn’t even had a sip yet, Honest!) I sat down in a low back chair, placed the glass on a small table between mine and my wife’s chair, containing our small, 15# or so dog, and picked up my laptop off the floor. Within seconds, my wife was calling me to come help with some art project she and our daughter were working on. I placed the laptop back on the floor and got up to go help. The dog decided then to jump from my wife’s chair to my chair, going over the table and knocking over my glass of wine, pouring it right onto my laptop. Even though I drained it quickly and disconnected the power and battery, there were shorts in the LCD causing bad areas. I spent over half a day replacing that LCD screen. So many little do-ditties to undo just to get to it! The whole innards were sticky with dried Beaujolais. It didn’t help that I was distracted by watching a marathon of MythBusters while trying to replace it. 🙂
March 1st, 2016 at 10:18 pm
Oy, John’s story is eternal. While making a small backup to an external hard drive with my girlfriend’s new dog snoozing on the sofa next to me, the rattle of her key in the door was heard. The dog awoke upon hearing this, launching itself through the air, connecting with the computer power cord, connecting with the external HD power cord, and sending the external HD plummeting to the ground while writing, carving a gouge into the magnetic disk platters and destroying in one fell swoop everything from my irreplaceable BBS-era file collection I’d previously backed up from hundreds of old floppies (and then thrown them out afterwards.)
Now try to ask us a question that prompts a /good/ memory 8)
March 2nd, 2016 at 3:54 pm
I have 3 different versions of the IBM PS/1 in my possession:
– http://www.pc-collection.com/images/2/201/2011-234-2011.jpg
– http://www.pc-collection.com/images/2/212/2121-142.jpg
– http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTU2M1gxNjAw/z/97YAAOSwBLlVfRDs/$_35.JPG
The first being my very first IBM which I believe I received in 1990. I used the heck out of that from surfing on Prodigy to writing school papers to helping my pop with his club’s newsletters.
As for your question, no, but my cats used to sleep on the towers causing the fans to get clogged with hair.
March 3rd, 2016 at 9:29 am
Possibly the more interesting topic is the idea of being able to work from home as positive societal force.
Growing up in the Eighties and Nineties, I remember my parents increasingly working at home in the evenings. I’m sure part of it was them advancing in their careers. However, before the home PC, with dedicated word and data processing suites, it was impractical for office-workers to do more than review work at home. Now workers could conduct real work “from the comfort of your own home.†Both my folks were issued laptops and regularly worked on the kitchen counter until long after I went to bed on school nights.
I recently changed careers and thoughtfully chose a path that pays a little less but respects my time away from the office.
March 5th, 2016 at 1:17 am
Dog damage… whooooo… Few dogs over the years.
Had a dog sever my Super Nintendo controller cables back in the day… somehow. I never quite worked out what she was doing.
More than one controller’s been chewed up by more than one dog. Nothing that isn’t DualShock-derived. They love them handles and little analog hats, just makes ’em INTERESTING to mouth on I think.
One dog bit through a laptop charger cable. And then the replacement. Not as in “she chewed on it until she worked through it”, as in “it got in her mouth, she closed her mouth, and the cable was now two cables”. She did the same to a few USB hubs. Powerful jaws, that one had.
The crowning glory was probably the dog that knocked my PSP off the shelf it was charging on. When it landed, different parts of the optical drive went in different directions.
March 5th, 2016 at 5:37 pm
We had the original PS/1 computer in 1990 as the family computer. I remember the GUI in the ROM very well. There was a trick that no matter how bad things got screwed up, you could hold down the right mouse button during boot up and it would restore it to the factory default.
March 7th, 2016 at 8:35 pm
My sister’s finnish spitz chewed through one of our NES controllers back in the 80s. My dad fixed it with twist-on wire connector caps and then wrapped it up in red electrical tape. I still use that controller whenever I’m playing games on the NES.
March 7th, 2016 at 8:36 pm
The NES controller cable… yeah.
March 8th, 2016 at 3:08 pm
No pets but I had a 386sx20 like the AD 🙂 Wolfenstein, Commander Keen and Police Quest 🙂
April 6th, 2016 at 2:46 pm
The PS/1 was the first computer my family ever owned, my mom bought it (as my dad has a severe tech phobia to this day) in 1990 when I was 5 and it got me into a life and career of computers.
We upgraded to a custom build off-brand 486 not long after, but I still remember the PS/1 introducing me to games…it had some built-in 9-block 3-in-a-row sort of game. The first sophisticated game I ever played on it was the PC-compatible Silpheed, and for whatever reason the PS/1 is the only system that ever output the voice effect in the game’s intro correctly for me. I played it with some basic CH joystick and of course the iconic PS/2 mouse. I think I finally beat it about 10 years later!