Dude I’m 57 years old and my first job right out of college was at a company that sold these computers in my country. You have no idea how many of these things I put together, upgraded, and installed. People looked at you like you came from outer space. Ohhh the memories. Of course these were extremely expensive back then (early 80s) so I used a Franklin ACE1000 for school work. I still have it too. Anyhow, I ended up moving to Miami and my first computer here was the IBM PC 5160. Got it as a gift from my boss; it came from a mechanic shop and it was covered in grime. Cleaned it all up, and it looked brand spanking new. I later replaced the motherboard for one the used a Z80 processor, can’t remember the name of it. I think I ended up giving it to GoodWill. Man we’ve come a loooooong way. 😅

Since this video I was able to archive the contents of the MFM drive by putting the original controller in my 5150 with the CF-IDE adapter and copying the files to the CF card in there. I would still like to hear how other people do it though. Especially putting an MFM drive like this in an AT class computer like a 486 which is easier to do archival work with. I also noticed a mistake where I misinterpreted the size of the files in a directory as the remaining disk space available towards the end. Opps.

@tickertape1

4 жыл бұрын

AkBKukU You are chucking a lot of videos out l love it thank you

@1337Shockwav3

4 жыл бұрын

Please archive that ROM as well ... I acquired a Xebec 1220 controller a while ago that was apparently shipped in some 5160 machines. One of the 4 jumperable HDD types actually supports 10mb at most.

@dominikschutz6300

4 жыл бұрын

The serial connector seemed interesting. Otherwise TelNet?

@TechTangents

4 жыл бұрын

Do you mean the 5160 BIOS ROM or the one on the MFM controller? I'm guessing MFM. That MFM controller seems uncommon so I should probably do that sooner than later.

@AttilaSVK

4 жыл бұрын

A friend of mine got a Toshiba T3100e which was used for controlling a machine in a printing house. He asked me to install MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 some (roughly) period correct software and games on it, etc. I used a null modem cable and Total Commander's serial plugin so I could move data between the T3100e and one of my Dell Latitude laptops I had at the time (ran Windows 7) and it worked out fine. Sometimes I was getting timeout errors because of the lousy USB to serial adapter cable, but it wasn't that bad. Not the best picture of the setup, but that's the only I have: ibb.co/tLHhRKq

The seller said ready to go out the box but they never said what box.

MFM drives were actually quite resilient providing you remembered to park the heads after each work session. That video card is bent, I don't think it's a faulty chip. Also if you go on collecting more IBM machines remember that beep code (one long - pause - 2 short), it's the standard "bad video card" warning.

There is Druaga's seal of approval in upper-left corner 0:41

@filminginportland1654

4 жыл бұрын

Aslin Fire Safety I do hope you know what a HI POT test actually is :) as funny as the name is.

Perfect timing, love old IBMs computers

I remember using the park command on my old IBMs. They were old when I had them. I had a 10mb drive, and I think one with a 20mb drive, both the full height and a half height. It would be kind of neat to still have had them around, but they have been gone for decades now along with an IBM Portable. It is cool to see some of them still operating and people enjoying working with them though.

Wow, this was my first “real” computer, that I got in 1994 with a 2400 baud modem, monochrome display, 20 MB MFM hard drive, and 640K expansion board with real-time clock. Got onto the internet (via shell account) and dialed a lot of BBSs with that thing. My previous computer was a TRS-80 Model 4, but all I had with it was VisiCalc and LeScript. No terminal emulation software so I couldn’t get an old 300 baud acoustic-coupled modem I found working with it. No games either, but I could write my own and it had a printer, at least. Anyway I upgraded that old XT several times, adding a 10 MB IDE hardcard and Hercules display adapter. That allowed me to run Windows 3.0 which was incredibly slow, but got me Solitaire lol. That old computer taught me a lot, and it jumpstarted my lucrative 25-year IT career despite being a three-time dropout with an eighth-grade education. With the right experience, education doesn’t matter in this industry, for which I’m grateful.

You should put the MDA card in the 5150 and the cga card in the 5160. That's what I did with mine. Then ega card for at AT 5170 and VGA in a PS/2. It's cool to see the progression in the IBM PC line.

@3:19 Man, those ST-225s were indestructible!!! Great machine, dude. I have a 5160 as well! The last time it worked was in the mid-2000s. It was in storage for a while, and when I tried to fire it up the other day, I got nothing :(

@rawr51919

4 жыл бұрын

It's probably time to open it up and see if anything went since the last time it was turned on from the sounds of that.

@BollingHolt

4 жыл бұрын

@@rawr51919 Yeah, I took it apart and pulled each card one at a time to see if it made any difference, but nothing positive happened. The power supply works and the mighty full height hard drive still spins up, but I get no error beeps, no video, etc. I haven't done any in depth testing on it :/

I'm impressed! have even the plastic protection that is too rare!

I've just recently got into your channel (binge watching intensifies)... All I can say is keep up the good work!! You make everything really entertaining. (Even though I am not familiar with some of the technology since I only got into computers in 2005)

is the original videocard... bent?

@DEMENTO01

4 жыл бұрын

Totally... YES

@davidcarr4991

4 жыл бұрын

@Hexo2000 Those POST beeps - 1 long 2 short = Video (Mono/CGA display circuitry) issue...

@linksmith1057

4 жыл бұрын

It did look suspiciously like it wanted to be a banana. I suspect heat for the years this thing was in service warped the board. Not uncommon with those old giant cards. Also possible this computer was stored on its side for several years and that warped it.

@BlackEpyon

4 жыл бұрын

That's why old PCs had those rails at the front of the chassis. A full length card would slide into one of those rails to prevent just that from occurring, though in this case it seems to have sagged in the middle instead. You'll notice that the monochrome card has the chips aligned perpendicular to the length of the board, where the other ones are aligned parallel to the board.

@kaczan3

4 жыл бұрын

Sir, I believe that's my avatar!

1 Long beep, followed by 2 short beeps means there is a display issue. In your case I would guess that the switch block is configured incorrectly (is set for a card with a BIOS, EGA and beyond, but you're using one without a BIOS). So the next question is how early a 5160 that is. I am guessing really early based on the fact that it has the earlier MDM controller card and XT-IDE problems.

@TechTangents

4 жыл бұрын

I figured it was probably that but when it worked after I put in the other card I got side tracked by being amazed it booted. I'll get it corrected when I open it next.

@johnvaldez8830

4 жыл бұрын

Oddly, I remembered that code too. I said, "Display...it's the display..." without even thinking.

I like how methodical and detailed is this video about the xt pc. I had one gifted and sadly I broke it and disassemble. But I still wish for fix it with modern caveats.

Imagine the capacity of a modern hard drive of that size.

4 жыл бұрын

TEN PETABYTES? hahahaha

@billy-waynejeffcoat4828

4 жыл бұрын

@ we were promised a petabyte hard drive in 2012, they being lazy

@j0anbug

4 жыл бұрын

@@billy-waynejeffcoat4828 not really being lazy, SSDs just stole the scene 'cuz of faster read/write times

@RedPandaGames75

4 жыл бұрын

Rylan Gray the largest commercially available storage device is a 16TB SSD

@MaxOoze

4 жыл бұрын

But MFM's had MASSIVE rare earth magnets. I have butchered many just for the magnetics. The new drives only have tiny magnets.

Good god man, where is this magical fountain of vintage computers you seem to have access to 😍

@raggededge82

4 жыл бұрын

there's 5160s on ebay right now for under 40$ plus shipping

If you look at the 5160 HD Controller, it has its own Z80 processor on it.

@Alexis_du_60

4 жыл бұрын

For a fact the Professional Graphics Controller had literally its own 8088 CPU.. It's not surprising.

I'm impressed with your expertise. I acquired an IBM PC XT many moons ago (20 years?) when my place of employment decided it was taking up too much storage space. So, I got it for free. Took it home, set it up and without the precautions you took here, turned it on. Presented with a system utterly unfamiliar to me, I then put it into storage with my mostly Commodore and other archaic consumer computers...where it has remained for all these years. Maybe I should check out what these machines bring on eBay, but I suspect not much. Likely a lot less than shipping costs, right?

Oh man, I still have on a closet one of those seagate MFM discs... When it starts and stops it sounds like a bus with faulty brakes xD

Nice score... I picked up two 5160s last yr on a whim never owning one before. The 1st one was $100, and the reason I got it was because all the 8 slots were filed with cards and had one full sized floppy and two st-225 Hds and to my surprise when I checked out all the cards it had a MDA vid card and an EGA vid card in it along with a 286 accelerator card in slot 8, that was a 256K motherboard that has a six pack plus that was in it to round out the ram. The 2nd one was $50 from an e-waste recycler and that one had two half height floppies and one st-225 Hd and a CGA vid card plus it was a 640k board fully populated. I put a XT-CF ECO-LITE XTIDE in the first 5160 and it booted perfectly fine, I guess I got lucky as both machines fired up fine with no electrical problems except I havent yet gotten any of the st-225s to access and the full sized tandon drive in the first machine didnt work until I watched your older video and soaked the stepper motor bearings with a little oil and it works fine except the heads are misaligned and it writes floppies only it can read. =/

Great video thanx! Looking forward to that separate video on the LED mhz display. I have one and would love to get it working properly. So far I've only been able to get a couple of segments lit, but no further.

@solarstream

4 жыл бұрын

EDIT: oops.. commented on the wrong video, was supposed to be in response to the 486 100 Dos video :-)

There is an serial controller on that one? Use Norton Commander on it and another computer. It lets you transfer over serial. It’s not super quick but it’s just 10 MB so won’t take that long. :)

@JayConverse

4 жыл бұрын

I still remember my first Norton Commander password, we had the "commercial" version.

@pederb82

4 жыл бұрын

Jay Converse Sadly I do not remember that well.

Microcomputers were introduced here in the Philippines during the '90s. 286, one color display. 386 one color display , 486 in color display, then Pentium 1 arrived. But during the '80s, there are Commodore 64 but very rare, and can only be afforded by rich people.

What a flashback to my youth. Thanks for the new (old?) memories!

4:50 - I really lucked out when building my 486 gaming DOS PC. Found both a CompatiCard & UniDOS card from MicroSolutions still in their boxes with diskettes and manuals at my local recycler (who've since shut down, unfortunately.) The CompatiCard lets you connect up to four drives and includes an external connector. They can be any combination of HD, DD, or SS in 3.5", 5.25", and even 8" drives with support for CP/M diskettes and drives with the accompanying UniDOS card. You can manually set the TPI for each drive using jumpers. You can set the card up as a primary controller (if no onboard controller) or as a secondary controller if you have onboard or a different controller card. Additionally, the card can also be set as tertiary and quaternary controller card with up to 4 CompatiCards installed simultaneously for up to 16 floppy drives, 18 if you have an onboard controller. I'm sure there were some use-case scenarios for having so many floppy drives, especially in a university setting. So my gaming PC has a 1.44MB 3.5", a 1.2MB 5.25", and a 360KB 5.25". I don't own an 8" drive, but it'd be fun to find one and play with those giant floppies. :D

Why are you surprised it still works? These things were a huge investment in their time and because of that they had a supreme standard for quality.

@80sCompaqPC

4 жыл бұрын

These 10MB full-height drives are incredibly reliable, but considering most of them had a 5-year component design life, it is truly incredible.

What is going on at the 17:02 timeline in the video?..the video card goes in front of the monitor and it gets magnified in a funny way?...

@TechTangents

4 жыл бұрын

I magnified the monitor while editing so you could see the RAM check easier in the video.

@nate5862

4 жыл бұрын

it confused me for a sec as well lol

@Gartral

4 жыл бұрын

@@TechTangents yea i thought you were pulling some weird Quantum Technomancy there for a minute!

6:45 Forbidden Love

I have one of these myself, but just the system unit. Same revision with the 10MB drive. I did upgrade the CPU to an NEC V20 and changed the drive to a 40MB ST-251 and WD controller. Had to use an 8-bit VGA so I could use a flat panel screen that is shared with my modern computers.

Laplink or Brooklyn bridge with a null modem cable or laplink parallel cable will let you access the drive from another computer. Alternatively, you can get a NE2000 network card or parallel network card and copy it over the network Finally, MS DOS backup utility will let you make a backup that you can restore to another computer. Laplink would be the least messy. But I think you'd get a lot of utility out of a parallel network adapter.

To increase the system speed, you can install a NEC V20 instead of the 8088.

@intel386DX

4 жыл бұрын

Stefan Gies in this motherboard it will be not any increased performanse ,you have to be with Turbo XT ,just like if you put 8086 if the motherboard do not support 16 bit bus it will run like a 8088 with 8 bit bus

@sgkonfetti

4 жыл бұрын

@@intel386DX You should have a look at Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20 The NEC V20 (μPD70108) was a processor made by NEC that was a reverse-engineered, pin-compatible version of the Intel 8088

I remember when I got my first clone IBM-compatible PC. It was (I think) a twin floppy system so I was quite keen to get a hard drive but couldn't raise the cash. Then I found a hard drive similar to your one, but possibly a 5MB? - in a cupboard at work. I asked about it and was told it was junk. It had been pulled from a machine as it had started throwing out loads of errors - read/write errors, bad sectors etc. I asked if I could have it, to see if I could do anything with it, and was told "Go ahead, it's going to be thrown out at some point anyway". Sp I took it home and installed it (don't remember how or when I got the controller) and ran a low-level format, which was IIRC an address call to the MFM controller (D300 address comes to mind). Sure enough, loads of errors. After a bit of messing around and not getting anywhere, I was running out of ideas. Then I noticed the tab connector on the back of the platter housing (yours has the same). I thought "that looks like an earth tab", so I ran a wire from it to the case (I think I used one of the power supply screws). I fired it up and ran the LLF again. Bingo! No more problems. That drive ran perfectly for quite a while, until I upgraded to a larger capacity IDE drive.

It's kind of amazing that you can fit 10 TERABYTES of disk space in the same physical space as 10 megabytes would take up 35 years ago.

This machine would be a great candidate for Hercules adapter OR one of the various dual graphics cards that supported CGA AND Hercules. Also, some of them even supported using CGA graphics on a Monochrome monitor. Very nice. ATI made one called the Small Wonder I believe. Western Digital (WDC) had several similar to this as well.

21:42 I doubt it, too. Thank goodness that caused no harm on what is, even factoring that out, a miraculously working hard drive, as ridiculously old as it is.

That dark smoked plastic cover for the front of the console looks like a holdover from the 1970's. It was my understanding that these drives need to have the PARK command invoked every time a session is ended and is powered down.

Not that long ago I picked up an NEC APCIV that had an ST-506 in it. I was amazed it worked. I played with it a little bit, but I replaced it (and its controller) with IDE components. I use it to run XENIX now. What was surprising, I found a sticker that says some computer store resold it about 1995 and by 1995 a computer with one 5.25: disk drive and a 10MB HDD was pretty obsolete.

This pleases me. Thank you.

That was one of my first computers I built! I didn't have the hard drive to start with but picked it up later. It developed a "sticktion" problem where I had to reach underneath and start it spinning. Good times :)

The 5160 was my first computer, all the way back in 1988/89. I have fond memories of the entire thing sounding like a turbine, and the *CLUNK* of the power switch. Still have no love for the Model F keyboard though. The one we had was pimped out with 20MB drive and ran CP/M for the first half a year or so until we got DOS for it.

"They're all 1983 chips" *touches chip from 1982*

I had one of these when I was 8 years old, w/ the 10mb hard drive. Over the years I upgraded it to a pentium before I got a newer at case

I had a 3270 PC (basically an XT) with the same ST-412 10MB hard drive and it also still worked perfectly fine. In my experience, the 10MB HDD's are more reliable than the later 20 and 30MB HDD's.

If you want, I have some MDA games, and they are not only text, but also action. Also to your question, you can use both disks together, XT ide and also Seagate ST-412. So you can pretty easily archive your ST drive to XT-ide.

another difference between the 5150 and 5160 is the 5150 has a cassette tape port next to the keyboard, the 5160 doesn't (since they were never used, plus the extra expansion slots). Something thats usually overlooked.

He is more excited with his 10MB hard drive than many people do with their 10TB ones.

Better to get rid of the varta now, before the jem'haadar show up.

@Elastane

4 жыл бұрын

lmao

Pretty Good Upgrade, Pretty Good Computer. This is A really Great Video!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, today was the day I learned about the existence of the drive bays front cover for this computer.

Nice find!

Very nice indeed!

GREAT VIDEO....gives this old ibm tech goosebumps hehehe

I got a 5162 from eBay a couple of years ago, probably paid way too much for it. The HDD had failed as had a couple of others I bought from eBay but I eventually got an XT IDE card and I use it with a Kingspec IDE SSD. I also added a VGA card so I could use it with a modern monitor (I had no original IBM monitor). I also replaced the PSU fan with a new blue LED fan which actually serves two purposes. 1) It allows the system to power on without an MFM HDD and 2) makes my IBM XT 286 almost completely quiet.

Per Y2K Compliance, I have an AST ComboPlus (Or some other AST card) in my 5160 and PC-DOS 5 or 6 (I forget which) and it is indeed Y2K compliant. So I think it would depend mostly on the capabilities of the RTC card you're using. If you do decide to replace the battery, it might be worth putting in a battery holder so you can swap out a battery and avoid leakage in the future. Unfortunately, the hard drive in my 5160 has not survived. So I have mine running on a Lo-Tech XT-IDE with a 2GB SanDisk Ultra CF with the HDD LED connected to the XT-IDE card. It's worked perfectly without issue. So it can definitely be done.

Great video! Would text adventure games, like the Zork series, work?

For your MDA Adapter: Try getting the switch settings on the back exactly as your second one and reseat the controller chip and the character ROM IC. These could have gotten a loose connection while shipping which happens. For your Backup: I think the most stressless way would be using something in the realm of laplink. This should work on the XT. One other thing you could try is a ZIP Drive although I am not certain if the driver would work on the machine or if it would need some newer processor. BTW: Have you already heard of the graphics converter using a PI Zero? I think this should work with MDA and CGA as well and uses rahter cheap parts to output to HDMI.

I just picked one up for $10 the other day, just needs a keyboard! You should get an ATI Small Wonder or EGA Wonder, you can display cga or ega graphics on the mono monitor or pretty much any monitor you want to use

As a kid we used to play hard drive bowling -- full height 5.25" drives were the best. Spin it up, roll it down the driveway, and watch it dance. Fun memories but I feel bad killing so much equipment that would be lusted after today.

Those Xebec MFM controller cards, while very reliable, are also very slow. They basically used the cheapest controller they could find. Even WD's first offering for the IBM PC was faster. I would put a small heatsink on that 8087. Those things run quite hot and mine runs hot enough that you can actually smell it. It made my mother extremely nervous every time I ran the thing until I put on the heatsink. I attached mine with silicone thermal adhesive and made a small shim so I could offset the heatsink slightly as to not cover the label on the package.

Just so you know, it is possible to make the XT-IDE coexist with the MFM controller :) it's not really a widely known trick however (many people prefer to rip out the original hard drive and controller) Also be careful about the slot 8 of the PC/XT! Only special ISA cards can work in it (such as the IBM Expansion chassis card, the Microsoft InPort mouse bus card which has a slot 8 jumper...)

I'm probably a bit late to the party, but 5V over 38ohm only equals about 131mA of current, so that's pretty far off a dead short and not a huge amount of load on the power supply (0.65W roughly). It may seem like quite a big drop from 200ohm, but I believe each of those little capacitors probably contributes a little bit of resistance between 5V and GND, plus any other components that do the same. All of that in parallel is going to present a lowish resistance value but doesn't necessarily represent a problem.

My first computer after my beloved zx spectrum was a tandon 286 with 1mb ram and 20mb hdd with a 5 1/4 floppy. bought it for 80 GBP and at some point the VDU stopped working so i actually found a repair shop that fixed it for 30 GBP, the state of the art at the time was 486 just before the first pentiums were rolling of the production line. I used to download games at college, copy them to floppy and take them home. I became very comfortable with QBASIC. I loved those old games, one chess program i really liked and enjoyed bunch of platform games and some really old top down RPGs. I used to actually prefer wordperfect to MS word. happy days

don´t worry much about the HDD, it sounds good to me, if it hadn´t been overheated, which i doubt, it will be good to go for several years(!!) to come.... The main problems on HDDs is the spindle motor, if that lubric is bad, it usually sounds like a jet engine, as the bearings had worned out....if it´s as silent as yours is, it´s a very happy drive...i´ve some old MFM/RLL drives (ST225s) which are still working fine, but ok they don´t need to spin all day long for eight hours straight, like in the old days..But from time ti time i still operate them with no problems. Of course it´s always a good idea to do a backup, as these drives doesn´t hold much data, from todays point of view ;)

Hello! Enjoyed your videos! I was wondering if I could ask you a tech question on the power supply for those original IBM 5100 series computers. I have a MEGA 4000 power supply that is putting out +/-21V instead of the +/-12V that should be coming out. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

On the mem expansion, those smaller yellow caps are thin film, they probably will never go bad.

That front cover is awesome. As for archiving the HDD, if you do find a way; please post it up. I too have a 5160 with a full HDD and with 30+ year old research data on it, that I’d hate to loose.

@cpmf2112

4 жыл бұрын

He moved the drive into a newer system with an MFM controller. It was afterwards, he commented above.

@mrlurchAU

4 жыл бұрын

Mike Finney Yup. Saw that about 2 seconds after I hit send 😁

I'm having a hard time dealing with only a 160MB HDD in a 386DX-20 IBM PS2 I have. 10MB is at least enough for DOS 3.21 I guess so that's nice. My Turbo XT I grew up with didn't have a hard drive at all. I swapped 5.25" disks for 10 years so I wouldn't complain.

Very nice, as an owner of an xt motherboard i'd like to get mine to work as well, i am missing a keyboard or an adapter for it and i have some memory problems in my board (post stops counting ram at 64k no matter which switches settings or ram chips i used or either which socketed ics i used) but some times it works giving me the error 301 and then it stops at "error. (resume = "F1" key)", so probably with a keyboard i can get it to boot sometimes, but i think that some ram related chips is bad. The xt is my favorite 8088 machine. it has all the good things of the 5150 and improoves it in every way, if i could get mine working i will enjoy gaming and programming on it a lot, i am waiting that the guy from monotech finalizes his deign for an all in one xt upgrade card and then i will order that and built a sound blaster 1.0 replica for myself.

I have a later revision that shipped with the half height rarer RLL capable 33MB ST-238R variant, but only hooked up to an MFM controller, so only 21MB usable in reality. It was common to run these in MFM only as the 238R is really a 225 with the best heads... Supposedly. RLL had a lot of failure issues, so they chucked them in as 225s because of stock overflow. I keep debating getting an RLL controller card, but they're so rare, and my feeling is it might stress the poor old HDD to breaking.

2:38 - The university I went to had a few old drives on display in the comp-sci department, one of which was about 2' long. I never bothered to take a closer look, but a quick search now indicates it might have been the IBM 3390 (though the only pictures I can find have the platters exposed, but the one at my uni had the cover one). 6:43 - It's _literally_ pretty. Aesthetically pleasing design _on the inside_ . 👍 6:45 - Yeah, it's amusing to see AMD chips in old systems. Intel gets all the attention but AMD's been around for a long time. 7:45 - What's that unpopulated socket at the top-right? 🤔

I want that front cover!!! 😍

I usually use a null-modem cable with interlink / intersvr, since I don't have modern interfaces like xt-cf, I transfer the data to a 486 and from there I copy them to a pentium III. it's slow and laborious but it works :)

any chance of you doing a video of the cables that you got connected from the monitor to the main unit please, because i've got a ibm 5160 with cga monitor and would like to know what cables i need to connected?

That hard drive is a monster.

20:55 "Tape to disk" is there to save the "virtual calculator tape" to the floppy or hard disk. Obviously this PC was used by someone doing bookkeeping or something similar.

An ati cga wonder card would be great. It works as mda, Hercules, and cga. And it can display all three graphics modes on an mda monitor including cga.

Did you ever get around to replacing that video card? My first PC was 5150, similarly specced when I first got it. Before I got a Hercules card I remember entertaining myself with the likes of Rogue, and Kingdom of Kroz, along with the usual text adventures. One thing that 8087 will help with is anything that you write with QuickBASIC that uses floating point arithmetic. I remember writing a cute little MDA fireworks demo where my 8088/8087 put the 286s at college to shame.

I HAVE NEVER CLICKED A VIDEO SO FAST

I had a 5160 drive (without the 5160) and it was black which I think was a WD drive. I put it in my Compaq Portable and it would overheat the PSU and die unless I put a fan on it, so I added in a 120MM auxiliary fan on the outside of it and that seemed to fix it.

not sure if you did this off camera but after removing the battery i'd recommend getting rid of any residual corrosive reside to avoid corrosion creep

Such a video on arching these HDD's would be useful, I am in the same boat, plus a test platform that is not the IBM.

I wonder if there is a RLL controller you can upgrade the hdd too. That brings back memories of have a Seagate hard drive. Back in the day, I had a full height hard drive that once I put the RLL controller in, got me 112mb.. if I remember correctly.. I could scramble an egg on it (Hot).

just hearing you go "DUUUUUUUDE" made me happy lol

*Looks over to my 5150* It's ok, I still love you

you can go EGA, just buy an adapter board and put in a VGA monitor, these adapter boards are easy to find now (but not that cheap). I use such an adapter on a Zenith Data systems 8088, I use it everyday with wordperfect 4.2, to hide from multitasking modern PC when I need to be efficient at writing.

I wonder why the 2-drive "standard PC" floppy controller won out against the 4-drive Shugart controller. Tandy 1000's were using Shugarts all the way til the final RSX model, which could make installing replacement drives a bit intimidating for the uninitiated (usually just need to make a custom cable)

that hard drive is surprisingly quiet

BTW if I recall, those MFM hard drives parked their own heads on power-down. Mine did, anyway, so I don’t think manually parking the heads was an issue by then. Though I still manually parked the heads each time anyway.

Locate an original Hercules graphics card for it. Then you can run graphics on the monochrome monitor. One of my 5160s is set up this way. Use MS-DOS 6's Interlink to back up the hard drive over serial. Works like a champ on these older computers.

An 8087? Man I envy you 20 years ago before I got rid of the old 8086 and 8088. I had one on the IBM Model 30 286 (287).

I used to use Laplink with a parallel crossover cable.

I enjoyed seeing a retro computer like this because of the historical value that leads all of us and our technologies today All powerful and modern computers now, it all starts here. Way back then is not considered primitive coz seeing the importance of it in the business world and home use. if you don't know how to use it, definitely you will be left behind and the possibility of not getting a job.

Dude, I remember having something like this in my pre-teen years when I didn't know the innards of a computer

Another video of a crusty old IBM? Yes please! :-D

You could get a Xircom PE3 and use mTCP. Really useful device...

The original IBM MDA and CGA card both use the same ROM chip. So you can try swapping the ROM from either another MDA card or a CGA card onto the faulty MDA card to see if that fixes the problem.

It seemed kind of fatalist to assume that a product named 'XT-IDE' would not work in an actual XT no matter what media you were using. Glad you've been able to figure out a backup option anyway.

I remember the first time I got to flick one of those big red power switches. The best computer I had used before then was the Commodore 64. The red switch makes you a pro! Good times

@richcornett5976

4 жыл бұрын

I remember our computer store receiving one of the first shipments. I unpacked it, plugged it all in, and powered it on. White smoke poured out of the Hard Drive. IBM refused to let us open it and paid big money to have it expressed shipped back to them. But otherwise this model was a fantastic work horse.

@MaxOoze

4 жыл бұрын

For me it it was day 1 of university and walking in to a lab with about 50 of these guys that anyone could just sit down and use.

Awesome!!!