IBM Personal Computer
The
IBM 5150 Personal Computer features an 8088 Intel processor, 256k of memory
on the motherboard, and a monochrome display adaptor 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 3.30 with it, which runs
on two floppy disks. 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, but you would be running DOS 1.1 (which is the only part that
costs more now, than it did then!)
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 3.10 (1985)
loaded on the hard drive. I also added IBM Displaywrite 4, version 1.00
(1986), IBM Writing Assistant Version 1.01 (1984), and Delta Direct Access
menu system (1986). I am planning on adding Release 2.01 of Lotus 1-2-3
(1985), but I'm wating to get my new "used" copy, as I don't want to open
the shrinkwrapped copy I already have. I'm trying to keep the software
all mid 80s, and I even keep the date set to the 80s when working on it,
so it will not be in any danger of y2k problems for at least another decade.
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 40
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 Connor 1Gb hard drive,
3.5" floppy drive, 8X CD-rom drive, sound card, 33.6kHz modem, and 4Mb
Trident AGP video 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.
It also has a 360k floppy drive from a Kaypro PC, along with the 1.44m
drive. I like the small IBM keyboard, which is early 90s vintage,
and has no numerical keypad to get in the way of the mouse. The operating
system is Windows 95, and time to boot up is about a minute.
IBM Personal Computer AT
This
is my latest 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'd love to find an original IBM 5154 Enhanced Color Display
for it, but they seem to be very scarce, ore at least expensive. 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, 1Mb
of expanded, and 2Mb 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 graphics adapter card has an extra
memory daughterboard, I haven't explored it yet to see what it has, but
I think it's probably 128k or 256k total, probably in 16k chips. I do need
to replace the battery, it does not keep time, although it still has enough
juice to save the setup data.
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 3.10 (1985)
loaded on the hard drive. I also added IBM Displaywrite 4, version 1.00
(1986), IBM Writing Assistant Version 1.01 (1984), and Delta Direct Access
menu system (1986). I am planning on adding Release 2.01 of Lotus 1-2-3
(1985), but I'm wating to get my new "used" copy, as I don't want to open
the shrinkwrapped copy I already have. I'm trying to keep the software
all mid 80s, and I even keep the date set to the 80s when working on it,
so it will not be in any danger of y2k problems for at least another decade.
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 40
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 Connor 1Gb hard drive,
3.5" floppy drive, 8X CD-rom drive, sound card, 33.6kHz modem, and 4Mb
Trident AGP video 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.
It also has a 360k floppy drive from a Kaypro PC, along with the 1.44m
drive. I like the small IBM keyboard, which is early 90s vintage,
and has no numerical keypad to get in the way of the mouse. The operating
system is Windows 95, and time to boot up is about a minute.
This
is my latest 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'd love to find an original IBM 5154 Enhanced Color Display
for it, but they seem to be very scarce, ore at least expensive. 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, 1Mb
of expanded, and 2Mb 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 graphics adapter card has an extra
memory daughterboard, I haven't explored it yet to see what it has, but
I think it's probably 128k or 256k total, probably in 16k chips. I do need
to replace the battery, it does not keep time, although it still has enough
juice to save the setup data.
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).