IBM P70 Introduction
I was graciously given this wonderful piece of mechanical sorcery from a friend. Back in college, I bought the Japanese version of this beast for an absurd amount because it was cool… A 386SX-20Mhz with 8MB of RAM and… get this… a red neon gas plasma display. Well, after many days of tinkering and trying to make that Japanese luggable useful, all I got it to do was run a Star Trek game that made the PC speaker go blip-blip-boop. We’re talking Pat Soo Hoo Apple //e sound effects on the PC here. The screen image took up 2/3 of the screen because it had a Japanese graphics card, and that’s what happens when you run American programs on it. The luggable went into storage and stayed there for a while..
Not too long ago, the American version of that Japanese luggable falls into my lap. It’s an IBM P70, better known as the 8573. Dang!! I gotta do something with it now… Again it’s a 386SX-20MHz, 8MB of RAM, and has a 120MB ESDI hard drive. This P70 also included a SMC Ethernet card and a 2400baud IBM modem! Also, it has that awesome, hot-to-the-touch neon gas plasma screen!! So, what do you do with an old PC? Why, put Linux on it and make it useful!!! Hey, IBM is allowing people to run Linux in a VM session under OS/390 on a mainframe. If a mainframe likes it, than a luggable must want a piece of the action.
I try booting from a floppy and guess what? General Floppy Drive Error. So, I troop on down to storage… and bring up that IBM Japanese luggable. I swap floppy drives, and brrr-brrr-brrr… general floppy drive error again. I even swapped floppy cables, and no go. I read on the web that floppy drives in P70s were prone to failure, because of their vertical orientation and the stress that occurs on the mechanics. Unforunately, you can’t use a regular floppy drive… you have to use IBM’s proprietary 1.44MB model. I drove down to the nearest used computer store and they only have the 2.88MB IBM floppy. Sigh. I decide to try it anyway, and low and behold, it works!! Yes, you CAN use a 2.88MB IBM floppy drive in a P70. The P70 recognizes it as a 1.44MB drive, though.
Now, I finally get down to Linux. I needed to customize the kernel and replace the kernel used on a distribution’s installation disks. Vanilla kernels in a distro usually don’t come with MCA Ethernet support, plus I wanted to trim the kernel down as much as I could. This P70 only has 8MB of RAM, ya know! Initally, I had troubles with the 2.4 kernel and available memory, so I decided to stick with the 2.2 kernel. I wanted to use with the Debian distribution, since I normally use that at home and work. I wanted to use Debian 3.0 but, no can do — it needs at least 12MB of RAM. Yikes. If I go with Debian 2.2rc7 (Potato), I have to use the 2.2 kernel, so that’s alright. So, with much tweaking of the linux kernel I got this puppy to boot up, ESDI drive and all.
I was getting ESDI errors during the installation of Linux. I had read, though, that errors and ESDI drives are not a new thing. I have to also remember that the 120MB ESDI drive in there isn’t exactly brand new, either. It works, though!! At any rate, I decided to purchase a “new” (I use that term loosely) ESDI hard drive. I was able to find a 160MB ESDI pull from an IBM Model 50 on eBay for $3.50.