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My two 5150 IBM's

K

Ken Vaughn

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 16, 2010
Messages
138
Location
Colorado, USA
I have two IBM PC's (5150). I am the original owner of both systems. I
bought the first in the fall of 1981, not long after it was introduced. It
is shown here with an amber monochrome monitor. The video display adapter
is the original IBM monochrome/printer card. The I/O card with piggyback
RAM is an Apparat Combo Card (Denver, CO company).

http://home.comcast.net/~kvaughn65c/early_ibm_pc.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~kvaughn65c/pc_interior.jpg

Here are two screen shots of IBM DOS 1.0 and CPM-86 (Digital Research).

http://home.comcast.net/~kvaughn65c/ibm_dos_1.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~kvaughn65c/cpm_86.jpg

I used this system for a couple of years and then gave it to my daughter
when she left home to attend college. I picked up a second PC for a
fraction of what I paid for my early 5150 when a local computer store went
out of business. I added a 33MB hard disk -- Apparat HIM card and external
cabinet. I used a CGA card and color monitor with this system, but it shown
here with a monochrome monitor.

http://home.comcast.net/~kvaughn65c/pc_with_hd.jpg

Ken Vaughn
 
Yes, very nice!
I'm starting to get the itch for a 5150 of my own lately. It just seems like it'd be like owning your own Sherman Tank! They are very appealing machines :)
 
Your first system has the black power supply and most likely the 64K mobo. Is your 2nd system the one with the silver power supply and 64-256K mobo? I have one of each as well.
 
strollin said:
Your first system has the black power supply and most likely the 64K mobo. Is your 2nd system the one with the silver power supply and 64-256K mobo? I have one of each as well.
Click to expand...

Yes, correct on both counts.
Here are the specs for my two systems:

First system which I bought in 1981:
SN0116140
Black power supply
16-64K motherboard
ROM U29 = 5700019
ROM U30 = 5700027
ROM U31 = 5700035
ROM U32 = 5700043
ROM U33 = 1501476 (appears to have been upgraded)

Second system:
SN09705255150
Silver power supply
64-256K motherboard
ROM U29 = 5000019
ROM U30 = 5000021
ROM U31 = 5000022
ROM U32 = 5000023
ROM U33 = 1501476

An observation -- in comparing the SN's posted by billdeg (under BIOS versions) with mine, it would appear that the later model (64-256K motherboard) has a 7 digit SN followed by "5150", unless that is just coincidence.
 
Its great that you were able to hold onto those systems all these years.
I sold my original systems everytime I upgraded to a faster one.
Fortunately I've been able to obtain two 5150's , one with
the 16-64KB motherboard I found on my local Craigslist for free, and
a second with the 64-256KB I purchased from eBay.

Have you checked out the XT-IDE thread in the forum ? This will allow
you to attach large IDE drives to your 5150's.
 
mikey99 said:
Its great that you were able to hold onto those systems all these years.
I sold my original systems everytime I upgraded to a faster one.
Fortunately I've been able to obtain two 5150's , one with
the 16-64KB motherboard I found on my local Craigslist for free, and
a second with the 64-256KB I purchased from eBay.

Have you checked out the XT-IDE thread in the forum ? This will allow
you to attach large IDE drives to your 5150's.
Click to expand...

No, probably not interested in adding a large IDE drive. I'm not really a collector, just happen to be old enough and having lived in the same house for more than 45 years, I kept those two IBM's.

I got rid of several systems over the years -- 286, 386 systems to name a couple. I kept a 486DX mid sized tower box with both a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drive. This is my "DOS only" system, although I still have an early laptop which runs Windows 98 and will also boot to DOS. I used this laptop a lot when I was capturing disk images from my "old PC" -- an 1977 IMSAI with Northstar disks (hard sector). I am the original owner of that system as well. I ran Northstar DOS, CP/M 1.4, and the UCSD Pascal system on that IMSAI. It still works fine, as does my first printer, an IDS-225 7-pin impact printer. If you think original IBM PC's were expensive, I would hate to tell you what I put into that system -- $1600 for memory alone, and that got me all of 65K, four 16K boards at an average of $400 each!
 
:) Always impressive to see nicely kept systems. Did you think they'd be collector items one day? Dos 1.0 very impressive too! So, again .. with the almost but not quite useful information (I'm great at that) isn't the IBM 5150 with the 16-64 motherboard the one that goes into the thousands on ebay? Opposed to a later 5150 which is $100 or so depending what's with it?
 
barythrin said:
:) Always impressive to see nicely kept systems. Did you think they'd be collector items one day? Dos 1.0 very impressive too! So, again .. with the almost but not quite useful information (I'm great at that) isn't the IBM 5150 with the 16-64 motherboard the one that goes into the thousands on ebay? Opposed to a later 5150 which is $100 or so depending what's with it?
Click to expand...

No, I really didn't think that they might be worth much. There is a store which sells used computers, mostly recent, here in Denver. Several years ago they had a stack of 5150's which they were practically giving away. I think they must have bought out some corporation's old systems.

I was pretty sure my old IMSAI/Northstar would be collectable at some point in time, but the old IBM's were hard to justify keeping. They had a little value to me because I learned so much from them, but didn't consider what they might be worth some day.

I worked in the computer industry since 1961. I started programming old UNIVAC vacuum tube computers with drum memories. I didn't keep any of those old manuals or card decks (UNIVAC round hole punched cards, not IBM Hollerith cards). They must be museum pieces today. I did keep my first assembly language programming manual when I started with Control Data Corp in 1966 and some Fortran program card decks, but that was more by accident than design.

I have a CDC core plane of 1024 bits hanging on the wall over my computer desk. This dates back to the mids 60's -- back when memory was "a buck a bit" on the CDC 6600 machines. I worked for CDC for 25 years.
 
Ken Vaughn said:
I have two IBM PC's (5150). I am the original owner of both systems. I
bought the first in the fall of 1981, not long after it was introduced. It
is shown here with an amber monochrome monitor. The video display adapter
is the original IBM monochrome/printer card. The I/O card with piggyback
RAM is an Apparat Combo Card (Denver, CO company).

http://home.comcast.net/~kvaughn65c/early_ibm_pc.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~kvaughn65c/pc_interior.jpg
Click to expand...

Nice units Ken.

From memory, here in New Zealand we didn't see any IBM PCs until 1983.

PC-DOS 1.0. Wow. I wouldn't mind seeing what that was like. Anyone know of any disk images around?

Tez
 
Thanks. Yes, I'd like to see what the very first version was like. Was 1.1 a bug fix or did it have a few more features/commands? Anyone know?

Tez
 
tezza said:
Thanks. Yes, I'd like to see what the very first version was like. Was 1.1 a bug fix or did it have a few more features/commands? Anyone know?

Tez
Click to expand...

...... pulled my DOS 1.1 manual off the shelf, popped the first few pages in my scanner and these pages give a quick summary of the diff 1.0 vs 1.1
 

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Last edited:
Ken Vaughn said:
An observation -- in comparing the SN's posted by billdeg (under BIOS versions) with mine, it would appear that the later model (64-256K motherboard) has a 7 digit SN followed by "5150", unless that is just coincidence.
Click to expand...
I have two 64-256kb 5150s and one has the short number and the other the long number! The short numbered unit is also missing the "IBM" marking on the bezel of the Tandon drives.

Does your DOS 1.0 manual have several pages inserted that were printed on a dot matrix printer?
 
Last edited:
mikey99 said:
http://www.retroarchive.org/dos/disks/

Several old DOS versions here including 1.1 , I've seen 1.0 around somewhere but cant remember the site.

I have the original IBM DOS 1.1 manual, with a copy of the diskette.
Click to expand...

Hi Guys,

I've been away from the computer for a few hours. I checked the disclaimer on the retroarchive.org link included above and it would appear that DOS 1.0 certainly qualifies -- it is much, much older than 10 years old, and is not available from any commercial source. I would be very willing to share a disk image, but I don't have the software to create a self-extracting executable like those on the retroarchive.org. Can anyone offer suggestions as to how I might post a disk image? I used DSKIMAGE 1.0 to create the raw image, and it contains no tracks/heads/sectors info. It is a 160KB binary image -- 40 tracks, single sided, 8 sectors per track.

DOS 1.0 is pretty minimal -- you have to enter the date manually.
 
I think most of the users here have DSKIMAGE so the binary image you created would work fine to create the bootable disk.

Do you have the IBM DOS 1.0 manual ?
 
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