IBM 5150, am I nuts or what?

--- Bob Stek <bobstek(a)ix.netcom.com> wrote: I have a 5150 that is serving in its original capacity as a user-interface for a Northwest Instruments bus analyzer box. The analyzer has a 68000 pod and captures the last 4096 bus accesses. I used it once to prove to our engineer that his 68010 design on our VAXBI COMBOARD(R) was screwing up byte accesses (he swapped UDS and LDS causing byte reads to pick up whatever happened to be the last upper or lower byte through the buffers - writes worked perfectly because the 680x0 writes the same data to D0-D7 as D8-D15 on a byte access). The 5150 itself came with an IBM-badged Epson something-X-80 printer, an original mono card (the monitor is long since dead) and some form of multi-expansion card (not an AST six-pack, but something like it). It also has some form of 10-20Mb hard disk in it. I realize this isn't how IBM shipped them, but it is how Northwest Instruments did. ISTR the price paid way back when was $5K for the PC and $20K for the analyzer, but the analyzer price _might_ have included the PC. We boxed the whole thing up at work in a gutted VAX-11/725 cabinet. At one point, we used 11/730s as production machines (linking binaries for our product under a non-primary version of VMS) and it was cheaper to buy 11/725s and harvest parts than it was to buy individual boards for the 11/730 (and a lot cheaper than DEC maintenance). I don't have my working 11/725 anymore, but it was a fun machine when I had it. With a bit of boot tape optimization, it came up almost as fast as our 11/750. -ethan ===== Even though my old e-mail address is no longer going to vanish, please note my new public address: erd(a)iname.com The original webpage address is still going away. The permanent home is: http://penguincentral.com/ See http://ohio.voyager.net/ for details. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com