Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing

about this lovely thing [chuckles at impending tasks]

It needs a little work.

Hopefully we'll be addressing this stuff.

This is the IBM Personal Computer XT Model 286,

otherwise known as the 5162.

I don't know if it's working, I've had it for a while now

I need to see if it works.

And it needs some restoration, that much is clear,

whether or not it's functional.

Hopefully this will be pretty interesting.

I've talked about IBM PCs and XTs and ATs

and different 286s but never a PC XT 286.

In case you're not aware, this is a system

that IBM introduced in late 1986 as a kind of

not really a stopgap, it -- so this is the weird thing.

It's a 286, and it came out after the IBM AT did.

And it was only on the market for a year or two

right before the IBM PS/2 line came around

and the IBM AT was discontinued.

So I've always wanted one,

but they are incredibly rare, apparently.

They're certainly valuable.

The value keeps shooting up over the past

however many years I had been looking for one, but yeah.

It's a lot like an IBM AT, except it's in a PC XT case.

And in fact, in some situations that apparently

could outperform the PC AT 286

at least the earlier ones.

So I might like to try and put that to the test

if we can get one of these working.

And yes, I did say one of these because...

I have two of them. Augh. [laughing]

So, thanks to Jonathan and Wesley for sending these

in my way a good while ago now.

I've just kind of had them sitting here

waiting to be restored.

I just, who knows!

Who knows what's going on inside at all.

In fact, let me turn these around.

All right, so as you can see this one internally,

at least from the rust and the battery leakage going on,

that is in a little rougher shape,

they both need some serious cleaning up though,

at the very least.

And again, functionally, there's no telling.

So that's what I'm going to try to do here today

is try to get them working,

or at the very least get one of them working.

Maybe sort of Frankenstein the two together if need be.

Ideally, I'd like to get them both working, of course,

because they are rare machines.

So yeah, and we'll just, we'll see.

IBM 5162, and they both have the badge.

In fact, this one still has the plastic on it, that's nice.

They were manufactured in Armonk, New York,

at least these were. A lot of them were actually

manufactured in Scotland, my IBM AT over there was.

It's got a power supply in here that is a little beefier

than were some of the earlier PCs because support hard disks

and more expansion cards and such.

And then these battery bays, these are interesting in fact,

let me just go and open them up.

This one I'm especially worried about 'cause it looks like

it has leaked and ruined a bunch of things.

I believe these are six volt lithium of some kind,

probably the sa-- yeah.

It's like the same ones that you get on a PS/2.

The IBM PS/2 has used the exact same type for

the battery backup of the settings

and the clock, and all that kind of stuff.

Now for the top one.

Well, that screw does not wanna budge, it's moving.

Yikes.

Well, we'll just put that back

and we'll get back to that later.

Anyway, yes, so we have the I/O section over here

with eight expansion cards each, or slots for the cards.

I think they're mostly 16 bit, actually maybe 8 bit.

I don't exactly remember right now, but yeah.

There's also the keyboard connector,

which I don't think is restricted

to the PC XT style of keyboard.

I think you can plug in like a five pin AT keyboard

here and it'll work just fine.

Like I said, it's just a strange hybrid of the AT and XT.

But yeah, the actual cards that are installed, I don't know.

I mean, obviously, we've got parallel and serial cards,

and there's a modem of some kind here.

This is probably a hard disk card or maybe a controller,

floppy, whatever.

Got a game port, it looks like down here,

and probably a floppy and hard disk controller card

from one of these.

This looks like CGA 'cause it's got the nine pin video

right there, and a d-sub connector and then composite.

And then up here it looks like a VGA connector.

So we got 15 pins right there.

So it'll be intriguing to see what's inside and of course,

what survived with all this nastiness going on.

But lets open them up, and see what we find.

[jazz music fades out]

Alrighty!

We're gonna start off with

the nastier of the two,

the one with the rust and battery leakage around back.

Neither one of these systems have all the screws around back

they're supposed to be five, they each only have three.

It's a little bent.

There we go.

Let's see what the damage is.

It's not great, but could be worse honestly.

Actually the motherboard itself

doesn't look terribly damaged.

The battery did however, leak onto the keyboard connector

and into the power cable connectors from the power supply.

The other thing I'm concerned about

are the tantalum capacitors,

see these little round yellow dudes in there?

They tend to... blow up. [nervous chuckle]

I'm just gonna be careful

whenever we do end up powering it on.

I mean, obviously, the ideal thing would be

to just replace them immediately,

but I don't have any replacements right now.

Yeah, they're one of those things where

you just, you can't tell if they're gonna be okay

or not just by looking at them.

Anyway, let's check out the cards

and things that are in here

since we can actually see precisely what we got now.

So first up, we do have quite a beefy hard drive,

not in capacity obviously, it's only 20 Megs

but pretty standard for AT class machines,

a type two, classic.

We have two different disk drives.

Looks like the top one is the standard 1.2 meg

five and a quarter inch

that they came with, by default, with the one below it...

Forgot to look at these earlier.

But yeah, you see this one with a little asterisk.

That usually means -- in fact I think it does for sure,

it means it is a 360K. In terms of the expansion cards,

in this one we've got all these are 16 bit ones here

and there's one eight bit one.

Looks like that is the video card

but, this is the pretty much standard

IBM floppy and hard disk controller here.

We have a serial and parallel card

of some kind installed here.

This is a modem, and we have a Hardcard.

Plus Hardcard XL 2105 it looks like,

I've never run across one of those that actually works

but that would be nice.

And then of course lastly is the graphics

and we'll see what that is.

Let me just take some of these out,

I wanna see what they are.

Alright, so here is the modem.

Practical Peripherals.

Made in USA, copyright 1991.

I like the speaker that has on there.

Probably like a 2400 bps, I don't know.

Yeah, check out that Plus Development Corporation Hardcard.

I've got, I think three of these now and none of them work.

Look at this little Cirrus Logic VGA card,

Got a CL-GD5401 chipset on there.

I'm not too familiar with that one,

but seems like a basic little card.

Bet it would do the job just fine.

Let's open up the other one, see what's inside that.

Oh, this one just has the 1.2 meg.

Let's see here we've got the hard disk, which is,

I don't know, it doesn't have any markings.

It's definitely a Seagate, ah! It is a ST-4038, wonderful.

As for the cards, yeah, that is definitely CGA card there.

One of the older ones with the amber brown kind of PCB.

The hard disk and floppy disk controller

looks like it's probably the same one as the other one.

In fact, this too the serial parallel seems to be the same.

This on the other hand, there's not much going on there.

It is just a straight up Analog Input Card as it puts it,

just a 15 pin game port, for plugging in joysticks and such,

no branding or anything.

A lot of these were made by Kraft.

This is just a generic looking part.

Let's check out the CGA card.

Yeah, I really like the way that these look.

I've got a couple others of these, IBM ones man.

They looked really cool, look at that brown dark orange

Copyright 1981, I believe I'm gonna use that for testing

the display and such just 'cause I have an IBM 5154

enhanced color display over here that'll work for CGA

and EGA so that'll be nice.

It is honestly looking pretty clean, all things considered.

I mean, it still needs to get cleaning but you know,

considering it hasn't been cleaned yet that's not bad

at the 286 down there and we have some...

This is gonna be a thing I don't know.

I've heard the RAM and these can be a little iffy

'cause I think you've got 128k

of just these little socketed doohickeys down here

and then you have these two modules that add another 512k

taking it to a total of 640k of system memory.

You take out these cards here

because we just really only need are the graphics

and the floppy and hard disk controller.

No sense and mucking up the troubleshooting period.

Alright if you're worried about my desktop surface here,

Don't be, I always get comments about that.

"Oh, you're sliding around scratching it up!"

It's just a vinyl laminate.

I'm gonna go ahead and put a new battery in here.

Hopefully if it boots up we'll be able to,

get into the software and save some settings

and whatnot with that though.

Can I get this plugged in

and just see what happens.

[chill reassembly beats]

After I've plugged in, let's power it on or try to.

[computer loudly whirs to life]

Well that's [laughing] about as good as I can hope.

640K ram, okay.

We got the 161 error

which just means we need to run the setup program.

Otherwise we can run basic, looks like it's running

in 40 column mode as well, intriguingly.

Hey, so we're gonna need a DOS,

we're gonna go with version 3.3.

Assuming the floppy drive works,

I don't have it cleaned or anything, really just want to see

if this was worth cleaning first.

Looks like it probably will be, it's trying to load.

All right.

Gonna give GSETUP a shot here.

This is one of those computers

where you can't just enter the BIOS on its own.

You have to have some software.

It does not like the 40 column mode.

Okay, well, let's try to put it on color 80 columns.

Okay rebooting, that looks better already.