On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 11:24 AM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
I don't know if anyone on the list will care of not, but I just
purchased a classic IBM PC (original model 5150) with a monochrome
card and monitor for $45 on EBay. ?According to the seller, it was in
Nice!. I rememebr buying my first PC-family machine -- an IBM 5160. I
wantred as much original IBM stuff as possible. The machine I bought had
been upgraded -- the MDA card and floppy controller had been replaced by
an all-in-one video/floppy/serial/parallel/game card (I forget the model,
but it was commonly used in Opus brand PCs over here). But the seller had
kept the original PBM boards and included them with the machine. Needless
to say I put them back.
Oh yes... my first IBM PC was a 5150 with dual-floppy drives and a CGA
display. I went and bought a Quadram Quadboard, filled it with 384K
and dove right in. I later bought an XT controller and a 10 MB hard
drive so that I could run PC/ix (which I am still looking for; I have
the downloadable images that were posted here at one point,but I'd
still like to find a "real" copy one day).
I still have that machine, it still works.
storage at a museum for 18 years. ?They pulled it
out, dusted it and
it booted DOS right away. ?It's a dual-floppy model.
I really don't like this cavalier approach of getting something out of
storage and powering it up without doing any tests first. But anyway...
Neither do I, but I take what I can get. :)
Should you need any hardware help with the machine, I
have the techref...
Much appreciated... I might ask for help decoding the motherboard DIP
switches at some point, but that won't happen until it arrives.
-tony
Feel free to ignore this if it's too
off-topic for the list. :)
Err, it's a computer. It's over 10 years old. Like it or not, the IBM PC
was a significant machine. How can it possibly be off-topic?
I was smiling when I wrote that! :)
mark