Worth?

[_J_]

I'm not really sure about this one, There's probably been alot of threads.. I recently acquired an IBM 5150 in what looks to be brand new condition, with original foam and box. From when my grandfather worked there..I took it out of the box carefully to take a picture of the back of it.. There's no cords, just the unit itself, the foam, and the box..

 

[Fallo]

This is the common 64k-256k 5150. From looking at the back, it has a CGA card, a parallel port, and a joystick port (both are probably the original IBM adapters). It's worth up to $50 or so, not as much as the 16k-64k model.

 

[Lorne]

I'd say maybe $ 75 (max $ 100) with the original box and foam.
Some people, like me, will pay quite a bit more for a bit of cardboard.

Did you find any other boxes of stuff with it (containing disks, manuals, software, etc) ?
If there's a DOS 1.1 or 1.0, then you'll be in the chips.

 

[_J_]

yeah my grandfather has quite a few more boxes of ibm stuff, a monitor for the comp, keyboard, a typewriter/printer/idk what it is lol, and some grey boxes that you opened that had the floppy disks in them, possibly one of those? he had like 7 of the boxes, grey-colored boxes. it was all a matter of what i could get up the stairs at the time lol

 

[VintageComputerman]

There was one on ebay recently that was a beat up wreak...

Sold AS-IS For Parts/Repair. Powers On When Plugged In. Gives a 501 Error.

It sold for $75.00 at best offer.

If you have a like new in box model, I think you might get up to $200.00, more if you list it with all the other stuff that comes with it.

I have seen a few pristine models sell in the 4 to 5 k range and have posted them here. You need to look at the serial number. The lower the better.

 

[_J_]

S/n: 12646085150 .. seems kind of long to me, but i searched and someone had a 196 beginning instead of 126 so thats considerably lower lol

 

[per]

S/n: 12646085150 .. seems kind of long to me, but i searched and someone had a 196 beginning instead of 126 so thats considerably lower lol

I wonder what my well used* XT will go for then (serial number 0010472).

* Well used means:

• Chassis is a little bent
• some paint on the inside of the chassis is missing
• the "IBM 5160" sticker on the back is missing (but there is some dried glue left)
• four of the original chassis screws are missing
• the power supply has been replaced (along with the four screws that mounts it to the chassis)
• the original hard drive has been replaced
• two keys on the keyboard have minor problems
• the original CGA monitor was compleetely destroyed during shippment (and now tossed away)

 

[southbird]

There was one on ebay recently that was a beat up wreak...

Sold AS-IS For Parts/Repair. Powers On When Plugged In. Gives a 501 Error.

It sold for $75.00 at best offer.

I'm sorry to bump an old topic, but I couldn't resist -- I'm the fella that purchased that unit. And it wasn't really a "beat up wreck", it just had a bit of scuffing on the case. The 501 was just due to a bad EGA video card (misconfigured besides), which I promptly replaced with a CGA and cleared that up. I now have the wondrous machine upgraded to its full 640KB (SIXPAKPLUS I/O card so it also provides a serial and parallel port and a clock battery), with a SoundBlaster, dual MFM hard drives (because I had them laying around...) and kept its full height floppy for kicks.

What I find hilarious is the number of machines on eBay where the seller is all "Boots up with a 301 error, so sold as-is" as if that were a terrible, unfixable thing... they usually have at least one picture of the unit displaying the error, and clearly no keyboard is plugged in. I guess we got spoiled after the BIOS stopped enforcing that as an "error" in late machines. But hey, whatever, it lets us in-the-know folks get better deals that way.


In the spirit of the original topic... if I were to price these things by TECHNOLOGY, the one PC I got in a Thrift Store some five years ago for $9.95 is probably correct. If I were to price them by nostalgia and availability, for a working unit, $150-$200, depending on how well equipped.

 

[phreakindee]

I bought mine, advertised as working with 640k RAM (and it was actually working!), for $9.99 on eBay, $20 shipping. So, prices vary wildly. I personally wouldn't pay over $50 including shipping for a good unit.

 

[southbird]

I bought mine, advertised as working with 640k RAM (and it was actually working!), for $9.99 on eBay, $20 shipping. So, prices vary wildly. I personally wouldn't pay over $50 including shipping for a good unit.

Yeah, that was part of the draw in my case, that was $75 flat, no shipping cost.

If you ask me, the $10 is all it's "worth." But when I was interested in acquiring mine (and I wanted it to be a 51x0 official, not AMD knockoff or whatever), I could not find any under ~$120. Just now I did an eBay search, I see a 5160 at $130, a 5150 "with VGA and keyboard" for $250, a "*Vintage* IBM 5150 Personal Computer - 8088 CPU & 2 FDD" for a whopping $500. Those are the only 51x0s I saw during this quick search. So while I don't personally feel the machine is WORTH $75 ... it was a good deal compared to the current eBay market.

Obviously you might get lucky here and there (especially those who don't realize that they can sell old things for lots of money), but right now I think there's a stranglehold on diminishing supply of these units, and that's driving the price up. Or I'm just not looking in the right place... I know all the thrift stores back home that used to always have four or five PCs during the "great dumping" seems to have dried up and disappeared as well.

One Good Will store was actually selling these ancient laptops for $1 or $5, in a stack. I bought them all, and through my young curiosity ripped several of them apart just to see how things were done. I remember one was a Tandy laptop and one was the original IBM dual-floppy "convertible" unit. Now see, if I knew then what I know now, those were probably some very nice things I could've gotten a lot more than $1 or $5 for. Need time travel...