How have I not seen this channel before? You're like a more technical LGR. Perfect presentation, relaxing delivery, instant sub!

Lenovo missed an opportunity to market a beige ThinkPad P70 as a tribute to this old beast.

I’m willing to bet that the previous owner couldn’t wipe the drive because the pc broke, and she took it to a “repair shop” which did that to the math coprocessor

I had two P70's back in the day for work, I remember lugging one in a backpack on a bicycle riding to work, it was portable but heavy. The gas plasma display was wonderful, I wrote a C program to do vga color palette cycling that was quite mesmerising. Thanks for your resurrection of the P70 :-)

That's an awesome fix and an awesome video man. Thank you for documenting this! So glad your persistence paid off. Totally worth it getting this excellent piece of history functional again.

Awe inspiring project and video. I have to admire your dedication to go to the end of this project despite the many hurdles.

Wow! An absolutely phenomenal effort to get this baby working again. Amazing job!

Thank you for the detailed information... I worked on a few of these in the 90's at my first PC shop... And oh boy any PS/2 system is fun fun fun to diagnose and repair!!!

Dude, Hard Drivin'! I spent days playing the port of that on my dad's old Amiga when I was a kid! I can't tell you how much nostalgia that little clip at the end brought me.

Those ALPS keyboard switches are a treat to listen to, despite the hollow sound from the reduced-density materials they used in the keyboard.

Absolutely fantastic work, totally praiseworthy. I've always been in love with these orange plasma displays. Reminds me of a nixie tube, in display form. That warm orange glow is like something out of Blade Runner.

An amazing piece of hardware - great job!

Awesome to see this machine running again!! It is a thing of beauty!! Love those orange plasma screens :)

Nice restoration video. The detail you provide is great. -- Its amazing what these sold for back in the day. Thanks for making and sharing this.

Many thanks for bringing to life this beautiful and rare piece of hardware. Wonderful videos that make the mind well, thank you very much! I already signed up and left my like, sorry I can not give 1000 likes

Glorious screen indeed, great restoration and beautiful machine.

I have never even seen one of these before, it’s a really sharp computer. Thanks for sharing. I have a really tweaked out 386DX-40 and Doom ran pretty smoothly on it.

What a cool fun little project, thanks for sharing it with us!

Hey just want you to know I'm happy that other people out here like you not understand the significance of these Technologies and these machines I appreciate your time and effort in restoring and protecting these valuable artifacts in computer history that's so many of us fail to understand their significance and importance thank you I hope that you're having a good day today and that all continues to go well it is my dream one day to own one of these as well and many other examples of amazing early computer work I also have to admit I love that gas display monitor

Really enjoyed this and seeing your process to get it working.

What a journey, thanks for putting in the time!

Congratulations for restoring it, and the former owners did had left awesome stuff on it. And that plasma screen is really amezing.

Holy crap! I stumbled across this video and my father had one of these!! He absolutely hated it! Lol It was hard to find a compatible vga monitor back then, AND his hinges broke and then the plasma screen died, all in the span of like 1 month. He got rid of it so fast haha. Great video!!

I remember evaluating one of those at work, back in the day. It was pretty cool and ridiculously expensive. I did loved that plasma display.

Beautiful! Lovely machine. And your tech skills are admirable.

Oh... This is the first PC I had ever... Thanks for bringing my memories back ;)

hey modern classic, this is the first video i have seen from you, i just subbed and i cannot wait to see what else you have!!!!!

We had loads of P70s and P75s where I worked in the early 1990s. A common problem we came across was a 301 error which I think was a keyboard error message. Good hardware for its day though and a good video. I'm glad you got past the problems in the previous video.

I grew up playing Doom on my 386DX-25, using the low detail setting (F5 key I think). I still remember my parents having to pay about $250 for 4MB of RAM on 30 pin SIMMs back when I built it. My next machine was an AMD 5x86-133. It felt like a supercomputer compared to the 386 LOL.

Love your videos! FS 3.0 was my first computer game in 1988. I ran it on a Compaq 386sx-25 laptop that weighed 16 pounds and cost $5,000. Sixteen shades of grey.

It's amazing the amount of work you put into this...fantastic job restoring it! Also, I love the monitor's "compatible with Windows 7" sticker at ~20:00 lol

Thanks for this nostalgic moment. Great job to put piece of back in proper working order. Back then, my they surely designed a floppy drive assembly, so that many decade later a standard 6" smartphone can fit in there, while the drive from my former japanese employer is being repared...

Well done! I'm glad you were able to restore this one to the degree you did.

i have one of these, haven't touched it in years. great video :)

I have about 18 vintage portable computers I have collected over the years, I have always wished for one of these but they are too expensive for me in any where near a working condition. I just finished rebuilding a Compaq portable 3 including replacing the horrible disintegrating keyboard cable with a new one, it looks really good now.

Awesome machine, and glad you got it working again. :-)

It's the orange screen that really makes this unit stand out. Great 2 part video, and I think I have to go shopping to see if I can find one of these units.

Thank you for this series. I was able to repair a p75 with your previous video on the floppy drive. I found that with some modification to the drive, I was able to make a standard floppy fit. Even supporting the old eject button albeit with some filing.

My uncle worked for IBM and in the 90s this was his home PC. I would hang out over there and install Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and play that on the screen. He had an external CRT hooked up for color, but i'd unhook it to marvel at the amber plasma screen and how good the picture quality was despite being a flat panel display from the 80s.

Man, IBM sells a machine for more than $8,000, and they don't even make the hinges out of metal. I'd be pissed if I broke a P70 because IBM cut corners with the hinges.

Congrats. It’s always satisfying to see a happy ending.

Amazing video mate! Such a cool machine. Was already going to comment that I would've loved to see Hard Driving on that display, but it seems you were a step ahead. :)

that's a beautiful computer, great job!!! (shout out from Italy)

I know people love that clicky keyboard sound but that noise caused many fights in my house as a kid. When your family computer is in the same room as your TV (common in the 90s), patience wears thin between 3 brothers, as the clicks overtake the sound of Night Rider reruns.

Nice work man .loved it

Nice video. I miss the 80's. Remember my first 286, then 386SX and then 486Sx and on and on. I'm glad that a pc last longer these days.

OMGGGGGGGGG! IVE SOOO BEEN WAITING FOR THIS!

Now this is going on my list of PC's to get sometime. I knew about the Compaq one, but I didn't know about this one. This one seems even nicer than the Compaq one.

WOW !!! I remember playing Hard Drivin at the local arcade. It was one of my favorites because it was the only driving game I knew of that had a clutch pedal and gear shifter.

When I bought a monochrome monitor I chose this color ver the green slow fade. I remember stacker and double space. I did use stacker for about 6 months. I enjoyed the look back

I'm using one of the these as a foot rest. I couldn't boot it but after this video now I might give it another go.

One of my favorite luggables! You gave it proper love. Those ancient parts graveyard websites are the worst when you're looking for replacement displays :|

Awesome topic and a great quality video that's right up my alley! Definitely +subbing and hitting the notify bell for you man!

That tetris version is the original PC version designed with a 8088/8086 running @4.7mhz. Its pace was dictated by the speed of the processor, so running it on a 386 made it a lot more difficult. I know because I loved this game and was first playing it on a green screen hercules on an 8088. Try it again on a slower machine, then you can really appreciate it :)

I always liked plasma displays. My Grandma had a Toshiba 3100. Had a 640x400 plasma EGA display that could even do shades. Had a few 8-bit isa slots too. It was nice to use a laptop with a display that didn't ghost all the time, color or not.

I remember this machine fondly and found this video while searching for it. I had one of these machines back in the late 1980s. It was loaned to my employer by IBM for a project, and came in a beautiful leather Hartmann carrying case. This was the first 386 machine I worked on, ran like a bat out of hell compared to the PCs I had used before that time and I used it to develop software under contract for IBM (I think it may have been IBM Professional FORTRAN for the PC). But I swear it was before 1989, maybe as early as 1987 and I remember using it for a couple of years before returning it sometime in the summer or early fall of 1989. Maybe it wasn't as long as I thought, or maybe it was a predecessor of the P70, or maybe it was an advance version, but it sure looked like a finished product to me. I loved the clicky keyboard as well and used IBM and later Northgate keyboards like that for years (with a lot of complaining from coworkers). The plasma display was also just fantastic, razor sharp for displays at the time, and great for writing code.

Ooooh, Blockout brings back memories. Played it to exhaustion on the Amiga 500. ❤️

So cool PC It looks and works now AWSOME!

i really love that orange font!!! 18:03 that looks great! " California Dreams is a defunct Polish computer video game developer that published games between 1987 and 1991. It contributed to the development of computer games in the late 1980s with titles such as Blockout, Street Rod, and Street Rod 2."

Did anyone make the Crysis joke yet?

14 pin adapter? My IBM monitor "adapter" is pliers. Great video! I love those lunch box systems!

At one of my first jobs in the 90's, i had two of those on my desk one day with an order "Do whatever you need to do to get one working". It was one of the managers "babies" and it was a prioritized job so i set out to fix it. The screen was broken so it was an easy fix. I checked out if there were any spare parts for it, but even though they were still available for order from IBM in 1997, they were extremely expensive. Just the screen was $800, so i thought that the rest of the parts were still expensive to i broke down the spares machine into parts so someone else could use those parts fix it in the future. That was also the year when i bought my first laptop, an AST Ascentia 900N. I got some spare parts from my employer for it when we cleaned out a storage area, weirdest thing i got was a Japanese keyboard.

Nice job! I have never seen this model before. I asume this was IBM's answer to the Compaq Portable 386 which was very popular at that time. I can remember delivering a lot of them to customers.

that thing is amazing great job

One of those got me through uni in the mid 90's and yes, Doom on it was an "experience"

Oh boy! I remember Stacker! It almost doubled the size of my computers 40MB HDD. Good old times.

My best friend had one of these when we were kids, the first time I ever played Doom was on one! Doom, Jeopardy, and Epic Pinball were all games we regularly played on it.

Awesome ending to this journey! What a beautiful machine. If you want a cheaper alternative for a sound card you could consider an OPL2LPT.

Awesome vid!

19:30 Wow! that looks really good! I never knew one of those old monochrome screen laptops could even do output of display.

Oh man! So much cool history stored on that machine! I haven't seen that Prodigy splash page in years. I wish you WOULD have opened Procomm though! I used to use that all the time before switching to something called QModem, I think. I hope you archive that software. I've never tried to see if it exists out there somewhere else. I'm glad you got this sweet machine back up and running! I was beginning to wonder if you had given up ;)

Beautiful machine.

great video, what an interesting weird machine. I loved doom in monochromatic!! hahaha, I love monochromatic monitors!!! not only your eyes get used to them, some things look "better" on them!.

Amazing...thank's for show this video. :)

Thanks for a really interesting video. I'm having some similar issues getting my PS/2 Model 55SX to boot from floppy. The original drive seems dead even after recapping, and I've been trying to use a modified cable to use with standard floppy drives, but without luck so far. What instructions did you use to make yours? Many thanks!

I never had any trouble with Stacker. Loved it. DoubleSpace, on the other hand, was a great way to lose your data. A lot of people wouldn't use DriveSpace at first, after being burnt by DoubleSpace.

I just found your channel, awesome Video :)

I had one with a microchannel soundblaster. And yes, I ran Doom on it. Excellent machine at the time. Too many problems/non standard parts to run as a retro rig today :(

Nice work. I have an old 486/50 Compaq Presario that I am going to attempt to get working again so I can play Doom, Ultima Underworld and Falcon 3.0 on their historical platforms! Wish me luck!

excellent vid, top notch

Wow. I haven't seen one of these in a long time. A company I used to work for had some of these for the research department staff who needed to take a computer to the site of where they were running a focus group. Glad to see you got it working. You were working with some larger sized surface mount parts. Those aren't that hard to solder. As the parts get smaller it gets more difficult if you aren't used to it. The one problem can be keeping the part in the right place while you solder one end. The upper lead of the cap shown at 2:00 looks like it should be bent so it is more vertical. It appears to be too close to the bottom left pin of the HA 13440 IC and almost touching some other pad(s) close to the radial cap body.

You can always get one of the Cyrus 486dlc overdrive ships for it, even a regular cyrix 486dlc but at the limited 20mhz but that depends if you want a authentic system or a faster one , interesting enough IBM actually made a verient of called the IBM 486SL that used in a lot of overdrive boards so authenticity wise I wouldn't bat a eye at some one doing that sort of a upgrade There is a makerspace in Michigan (National science institute) with a CNC the plastic hinges look simple enough to cut out of solid aluminium but you will have to hunt down a makerspace close to you with a CNC

Last month a neighbor had died and the house was/is being renovated. To my suprise, an IBM 8513 display showed up on the curb/trash night. As a CRT collector I had to stop. It's in nice shape and does work too, luckily I have an older Pentium 3 in my attic to test. Not sure of my plan for it yet. I will say though, my first monitor was a CGA/LaserXT IBM clone so even in 2018 I was excited for a real IBM VGA. (Or is it technically EGA?) haha Thanks for the videos, you always have good content/info.

Nice! I got mine today! It has IBM DOS 6.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on it and some strange land survey software called Traverse PC.

As for red turning black (or blue for that matter) is because the gas plasma is only pulling from the green channel. Generally anything using a standard palette will get a "weighted" greyscale look, meaning green is bright, red is not as bright, and blue is dark, but are still there. For games however like Doom (or even Windows for that matter), it simply writes a custom palette to be used and thus overwrites the monochrome specific palette. I have a Model 25 with a VGA card I installed, and wired up a custom harness. The VGA card outputs gray scale since I set the sense pins as such, but on some software like Wolfenstein 3D (8086 version), the card starts outputting color rather than gray scale, and thus the CRT starts looking just like your gas plasma, everything but red and blue.

Great system. The display is somewhat reminiscent of the legendary Plato 3.

My king ant borrowed this one from work. Heavy and huge, but nice! I played DOOM shareware, Golden Axe, etc. on it. No sound card though. :O

I used to carry one of these back in the days. It was so heavy and it came in a leather type case . It had an SDLC card inside. And no I do not miss it. This retro thing is definitely a millennial thing.

Remember when everyone had to have a plasma TV, 15 years ago? Plasma was the future.

Good job mate, glad you got it working so nicely! I first played Doom on a 386DX/40 ... took 50 minutes to download the 0.9mb demo over the 14.4k modem lol I also ran Windows 95 OSR1 on the thing... took 7 minutes to boot with 20mb ram, I timed it... lol Later releases wouldn't even boot hehehe Ah the good old days... :)

this is so interesting. I have never seen this computer and the screen is so cool! I have also never seen win 3.1. the UI is so weird and interesting.

I also love the commodore 64 that also looked like this case.

what a clean machine special the keybord

Do you possibly know where to find that castle desktop background image? I quite like it.

Communications Canada sticker on the modem :) I remember the same thing on the modem on my dad's PS/1 from almost 30 years ago...

In case anyone is interested: The refstamp utility does nothing but write the bytes (hex) 20 33 79 at offset 8 into sector 0, which is apparently the last sector of the drive. So now you can all go ahead and write a utility to do that for whatever OS you'd like.

Hi, interesting your video .... I have one of these personal computers .... who had thrown it without knowing that today is a museum piece .... sometimes I try it and still works very well. ... it is a very particular and unavailable piece at least here in Italy

Not sure if you still see these messages. I do still have a P70 that does run. I was the original user of this machine and have both Token Ring 4/16 and 10MB Ethernet cards in it. I used it mainly as a trace and performance diagnostic tool (IBM Trace and Performance using OS/2 Warp) for customer networks. It is set up as a dual boot machine with OS/2 and Windows 3.1. I was an IBM Systems Engineer and received this machine new and somehow kept it running for years then put it on the shelf. When I left in the car overnight in the winter it would blow snow out the back when I powered it up without letting it warm up. This ran like a tank and nothing and nothing is broken. The key to keeping it running was to keep the collection of Reference diskettes and change the CMOS battery once in a while.

Man, I remember having a "laptop" with an orange plasma screen and a busted CMOS battery. I spent so much time as a kid just fidding with the BIOS and the settings, occasionally getting it to boot to DOS (I was *very* young, so I didn't even think to take notes... nor did I know any English at the time). I knew how to start Lemmings from the command prompt though. :D

This looks like a post futuristic Virtual Boy. The games look amazing in monochrome orange/red!