Announced 1987-04-02. This was part of the first set of PS/2 machines,
along with the 8580.
It had a 286, 1MB RAM (for more you need an adapter card),
and a 20MB hard drive. It cost $3,595. To compare: Three years earlier,
an AT with very similar equipment had cost $8,915.
The Personal System/2 Model 50 (IBM 8550) introduces advanced design and technology and a new MICRO CHANNEL ARCHITECTURE to provide significant price/performance enhancements for desktop computing and workstations. The 10MHz INTEL 80286 microprocessor offers application growth capabilities and is designed to maintain software compatibility with most current IBM personal computer programs. A high level of feature integration on the system board reduces optional adapter requirements. When configured with the new analog displays, the IBM 8550's new integrated Video Graphics Array (VGA) provides enhanced performance, increased display functions, and increased color availability. The system includes a 1.44MB, 3.5-inch diskette drive and a 20MB fixed disk drive. Besides the new mouse, memory, math co-processor, and diskette drive options, new connectivity options (dual asynchronous, multi- protocol, and modem adapters, and other options) allow the IBM 8550 to communicate with a variety of hosts and networks.
Unlike the one on this photo, my machine is a rather early one and still has the red power switch. Nor do I have such a fine 16" monitor to go with it. Originally I used it with an 8518, a 14" monitor from 1991/92. Now I have a more fitting 8512. Apart from the size it looks exactly like the one in the picture. I do have an original keyboard and mouse as shown on the picture, though I rarely use a mouse with this computer.
This computer had been used in an office till 1999 or something, and then given to kids to play. It had MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 when I bought it. (I gathered the part with the kids from Windows color settings named DEDEKDIEF and similar.) I ended up formatting the hard drive and installing DR-DOS.
It is pretty much in original condition, as far as the hardware is concerned, except that I added a second floppy drive and a 8514/A video card. I'd like to give it some more RAM, but the only memory card I have is a 32bit one.
I'm especially fond of playing games with ASCII graphics on it; games that do complicated things like synthesized speech over the PC speaker; games that are rather small (less than 100kB) or can be played directly from a floppy disk (after all, half of the 20MB harddrive is already taken up by DR-DOS). These games include:
| The Queen of Hearts Maze Game | ASCII | Pac-Man | 1982 |  |
Ran too fast? |
| Beast | ASCII | Puzzle | 1984 | |
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| Rogue | ASCII | Roguelike | |
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| Turbo-Gomoku | ASCII | Gomoku | 1985 | |
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| Beyond Castle Wolfenstein | CGA | Adventure | |
Ran too fast! | |
| The Fourth Protocol | CGA | Adventure |  |
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| Arkanoid | EGA | Arcade | 1988 |  |
Ran too fast? |
| Wasteland | EGA | RPG | |
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| Blockout | EGA | tetris | 1989 | |
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| Dammit! | EGA | card | |
Mouse driver problems | |
| Hanse | EGA | strat |  |
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| Pipe Mania | EGA | Puzzle | |
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| The Sentinel | EGA | |
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| Kingdom of Kroz | ASCII | Adventure | 1990 | |
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| Popgames | ASCII | |
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| Shogatsu | ASCII | Puzzle | |
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| TetraFix | ASCII | tetris | |
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| Artworx' Strip Poker Three | VGA | Strip Poker | 1991 | |
Synthesized speech worked well |
| Brix | VGA | Puzzle | |
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| Kalakh | EGA | Manacala |  |
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| Tiles | ASCII | Puzzle | 1992 | |
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| Tetrix | EGA | tetris |  |
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| Trubis | EGA | tetris |  |
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| Stakan | CGA | tetris | 1993 |  |
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| Fintris | VGA | tetris |  |
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| SimCity Classic | VGA | strat | |
EGA, "Animate all" off, no sound |
The two games in this list that gave problems were Dammit and SimCity Classic. With Dammit, it was just the mouse driver; the game requires a mouse, the DR-DOS mouse driver does not seem to work with hi-res EGA mode, and cutemouse wouldn't run on this machine. I guess a Microsoft mouse driver would solve the problem.
SimCity Classic simply requires something faster. With monochrome VGA graphics, "Animate all" off, and no sound, it ran fine for a while, but then crashed anyway. I guess the original SimCity might work better.
What I did not include in this list is Wolfenstein 3D. Yes, I actually tried to run it once on this computer, and it even worked for a while, but then crashed. It is, of course, no fun without a soundcard anyway.
Apart from that, I played around with TheDraw a bit, creating a welcome screen and a menu; created some simple images with ZSoft Paintbrush; ran programs that play music over the PC speaker.