IBM Personal Computer
The
IBM 5150 Personal Computer features an 8088 Intel processor, 256k of memory
on the motherboard, and a monochrome display adapter driving a 5151 green/black
monitor. It has two full height IBM 5.25" 360k floppy drives, and no hard
drive. I have an original IBM DOS version 1.10 with it, which runs
from one 160K floppy disk. The original IBM 5152 printer is an Epson MX-80
with the IBM label. This whole shebang would have cost you around $4000
back in 1983.
IBM Personal Computer XT
This
5160 Personal Computer XT (eXTended) came equipped from IBM with lots of
good stuff, including 256k RAM on the motherboard, plus a 256k RAM expansion
card (with strange IBM 64k x 8 chips), an asynchronous communications port,
one 5.25" full height IBM 360k floppy drive, a 10m IBM (Seagate) hard drive,
and a Color Graphics Adapter driving an IBM 5153 color monitor, plus the
Monochrome Display Adapter, which also drives the printer. I have the original
IBM book on this one, which includes the diagnostics disk, and a cool "getting
to know your IBM PC" educational disk. This one has IBM DOS 2.10 (1984)
loaded on the hard drive. This computer does NOT have a real time
clock, you must enter the time and date every time you boot it up. I have
an AST Six Pack Plus memory/clock/comm/gameport board, with the software
and manual, but I don't want to put any non-IBM cards in this computer,
as it is just too original to mess with.
Some differences between the PC and XT include the type of power supply
originally included--63 vs 135 watts; the number and spacing of expansion
slots--5 vs 8; the PC has a cassette tape interface connector on the back,
if you couldn't afford to order the floppy with it...drives were expensive
back in August, 1981, when it was introduced. The XT came standard with
the 10m drive, but it cost close to $6000 (configured like this one) when
introduced in 1983. I bought the XT computer used 15 years later for $8.
Hot Rodded IBM XT
This
is the computer I'm using to make this web page...a slightly modified IBM
PC XT model 5160. I removed the 8088 motherboard from this one, and substituted
a FIC Socket 7 motherboard, with an AMD K6-2/300Mhz processor. It has 96
Mb of ram (as opposed to 256Kb on the original), along with 1 Mb of cache.
I'm running it at 100Mhz bus speed, which seems to work ok even though
I'm using 60ns SIMMs. Other features include a Seagate 30Gb hard
drive, 3.5" floppy drive, 8X/4X/32X CD-R/RW drive, sound card, 33.6kHz
modem, and 2Mb Trident PCI video card, and a PCI network card. The new
motherboard fit just fine, becaus it is just a bit shorter than the XT
board, and the XT style 150 watt power supply (not an original IBM, since
it has power for 4 drives) has not been a problem. I like the small IBM
keyboard, which is early 90s vintage (an option on the PS/2 computers),
and has no numerical keypad to get in the way of the mouse. The operating
system is Windows 95B, and time to boot up is less than a minute.
IBM Personal Computer AT
This
is an IBM PC/AT (Advanced Technology) Model 5170 computer. It was at the
thrift store, and apparently came from the University of Arizona Optical
Sciences department (where my brothers worked around 1980). It has an IBM
EGA video card, here set to work with the standard IBM 5153 Color Display.
I finally found an original IBM 5154 Enhanced Color Display for it, not
pictured here. The computer has an 8 mHz 80286 processor, running at 6
mHz, and the full capacity of 512 kbytes of memory on the motherboard.
It also has an IBM 30 mb hard disk, and the original 5.25" high density
floppy drive. Note that the original cover is still there for the optional
floppy drive, usually the cover was thrown away when a 3.5" drive was added.
There is the original IBM disk drive controller board inside, this is an
extra tall full length board, as it controls both the floppy and hard drives.
There is also a Paradise I/O board, with one 9 pin RS-232 port and one
parallel port. I added some extra RAM on two BocaRam AT boards, including
128k of conventional, and 3 Mb of extended memory. It has the original
DOS 3.30 on it, and I added Windows 1.04 just for fun. Note that the EGA
board displays all 16 colors on the 5153 monitor.
Hot Rodded IBM AT
This
is my first IBM Model 5170 AT computer. Unfortunately, someone had replaced
the original 286 motherboard with a cheezy 386SX before I got it. Since
I got the new motherboard for my hotrod XT, I put the 66MHz Pentium board
into this AT. It has 24M RAM, a 2x CD drive, 400m hard drive, sound,
28k modem, and 2mb PCI video. Operating system is Windows 95.
The performance is acceptable for running software that's a few years old,
and for surfing the web with a modern browser (it has Netscape 4.61 installed).
This
5160 Personal Computer XT (eXTended) came equipped from IBM with lots of
good stuff, including 256k RAM on the motherboard, plus a 256k RAM expansion
card (with strange IBM 64k x 8 chips), an asynchronous communications port,
one 5.25" full height IBM 360k floppy drive, a 10m IBM (Seagate) hard drive,
and a Color Graphics Adapter driving an IBM 5153 color monitor, plus the
Monochrome Display Adapter, which also drives the printer. I have the original
IBM book on this one, which includes the diagnostics disk, and a cool "getting
to know your IBM PC" educational disk. This one has IBM DOS 2.10 (1984)
loaded on the hard drive. This computer does NOT have a real time
clock, you must enter the time and date every time you boot it up. I have
an AST Six Pack Plus memory/clock/comm/gameport board, with the software
and manual, but I don't want to put any non-IBM cards in this computer,
as it is just too original to mess with.
This
is the computer I'm using to make this web page...a slightly modified IBM
PC XT model 5160. I removed the 8088 motherboard from this one, and substituted
a FIC Socket 7 motherboard, with an AMD K6-2/300Mhz processor. It has 96
Mb of ram (as opposed to 256Kb on the original), along with 1 Mb of cache.
I'm running it at 100Mhz bus speed, which seems to work ok even though
I'm using 60ns SIMMs. Other features include a Seagate 30Gb hard
drive, 3.5" floppy drive, 8X/4X/32X CD-R/RW drive, sound card, 33.6kHz
modem, and 2Mb Trident PCI video card, and a PCI network card. The new
motherboard fit just fine, becaus it is just a bit shorter than the XT
board, and the XT style 150 watt power supply (not an original IBM, since
it has power for 4 drives) has not been a problem. I like the small IBM
keyboard, which is early 90s vintage (an option on the PS/2 computers),
and has no numerical keypad to get in the way of the mouse. The operating
system is Windows 95B, and time to boot up is less than a minute.
This
is an IBM PC/AT (Advanced Technology) Model 5170 computer. It was at the
thrift store, and apparently came from the University of Arizona Optical
Sciences department (where my brothers worked around 1980). It has an IBM
EGA video card, here set to work with the standard IBM 5153 Color Display.
I finally found an original IBM 5154 Enhanced Color Display for it, not
pictured here. The computer has an 8 mHz 80286 processor, running at 6
mHz, and the full capacity of 512 kbytes of memory on the motherboard.
It also has an IBM 30 mb hard disk, and the original 5.25" high density
floppy drive. Note that the original cover is still there for the optional
floppy drive, usually the cover was thrown away when a 3.5" drive was added.
There is the original IBM disk drive controller board inside, this is an
extra tall full length board, as it controls both the floppy and hard drives.
There is also a Paradise I/O board, with one 9 pin RS-232 port and one
parallel port. I added some extra RAM on two BocaRam AT boards, including
128k of conventional, and 3 Mb of extended memory. It has the original
DOS 3.30 on it, and I added Windows 1.04 just for fun. Note that the EGA
board displays all 16 colors on the 5153 monitor.
This
is my first IBM Model 5170 AT computer. Unfortunately, someone had replaced
the original 286 motherboard with a cheezy 386SX before I got it. Since
I got the new motherboard for my hotrod XT, I put the 66MHz Pentium board
into this AT. It has 24M RAM, a 2x CD drive, 400m hard drive, sound,
28k modem, and 2mb PCI video. Operating system is Windows 95.
The performance is acceptable for running software that's a few years old,
and for surfing the web with a modern browser (it has Netscape 4.61 installed).