dongfeng
Veteran Member
IBM also sold a kit that allowed you to change your early PC to a later BIOS.
IBM handed out BIOS upgrades for earlier PC owners. It was needed for early network adapters that did remote booting, hard drives, and anything else that might have had a ROM BIOS extension. So it is entirely possible that an early machine could have a hard drive, but it was either booting from floppies or the BIOS of the machine had been upgraded.
A side note to the original topic of this thread; the highest bid on this particular IBM PC has now rised from $335 to $455 with 25 hours to go.
There was a broken 5150 in the UK at the end of July. The monitor was tested OK, but the computer was silent and didn't power up the monitor. It ended at £9.99. Another one sells an untested 5150 spare parts machine with a broken, aftermarket PSU. Despite being relisted several times, it hasn't received a bid, starting at £0.99.
Sorry for spamming, but now it is $510, from a bidder who in the last two hours managed to complete another auction and gain one feedback point. What are the odds this one will end on $600+ and result in a dozen people go through their garages to find half functioning IBM PCs auctioned with starting bids at $300 in the next month?
Damn, I would accept that for my whole pre-PS/2 collection. Still waiting for a Kaypro craze to peddle my Kaypros which was a much more interesting and sexy machine IMHO and with Uniform could run Dos.
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What do you think an original 16K system with all IBM parts (2 5.25" drives, IBM 256K expansion card, IBM Mono card, IBM CGA card, etc,) DOS 1.0, Guide to Operations 1.0, BASIC Manual 1.0 would go for? :D
Someone was interested to buy three quite uncommon VIC-20 cartridges from me. I'm not particularly interested to sell, but quoted him an insane price ($70+ each), and he said yes.. maybe.. next month. We'll see what happens.I'm not sure I'd accept money for anything I didn't want to sell,