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Jerry Richter Oversen’s IBM 5161 Expansion Unit

By bike I assume you mean bicycle. At least some of us are staying in shape. :)

I am not an engineer -- I'm a meteorologist. If you would like a detailed description of what I did to my small footprint, 3 HH bay case 286 (in 1989-1990) just say the word and I present all the details. And in the end, everything worked perfectly, too.
 
Stone said:
Why would Jerry Ovesen have used a machine that had a 5161 case and a clone XT board in it?
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Why not? With multi-function cards and bigger & leaner hard disks the 5161s were pretty well obsolete but still made a nice case; I also gutted mine and put an XT clone into it, later upgraded to a 486, which ran my Watson 'answering machine' for more than ten years.
 
I must be missing something here.

His obituary talks about his involvement with DOS. But I have not found any references to his involvement with DOS anywhere else. Except for his obituary and this eBay listing, there is nothing that links him to the development of DOS.

IBM does have a big development facility in Rochester, MN. But they made the System/36, System/38, AS/400 and related products. It would be unlikely to have a major camp of DOS developers up here given how territorial IBMers were about "missions".


Mike
 
mbbrutman said:
I must be missing something here.

His obituary talks about his involvement with DOS. But I have not found any references to his involvement with DOS anywhere else. Except for his obituary and this eBay listing, there is nothing that links him to the development of DOS.

IBM does have a big development facility in Rochester, MN. But they made the System/36, System/38, AS/400 and related products. It would be unlikely to have a major camp of DOS developers up here given how territorial IBMers were about "missions".


Mike
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The claim does not say it was (PC)MS-DOS but just DOS. Since the 360 had several different operating systems all using a variation of the DOS name, he could have worked on any of those. Unlikely to have valuable source code on an XT; IBMers were usually fairly careful at protecting that but it won't make as cool a story to drum up the auction price.
 
krebizfan said:
The claim does not say it was (PC)MS-DOS but just DOS. Since the 360 had several different operating systems all using a variation of the DOS name, he could have worked on any of those. Unlikely to have valuable source code on an XT; IBMers were usually fairly careful at protecting that but it won't make as cool a story to drum up the auction price.
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No references. No patents. Nothing.

It's an interesting system. But it has no 'provenance' that I can detect, other than it was owned by a career IBMer.
 
MikeS said:
Why not? With multi-function cards and bigger & leaner hard disks the 5161s were pretty well obsolete but still made a nice case; I also gutted mine and put an XT clone into it, later upgraded to a 486, which ran my Watson 'answering machine' for more than ten years.
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Mike, don't take this personally because that's not how it's meant. While I can't say with any degree of certainty I just don't believe that you and Jerry O. were in comparable positions some 20 - 25 years ago. While you (and I) might have been tinkering with extra parts machines and whatnot it just seems that he would have a nice, new factory assembled 286 to play on. I don't have any facts to support this theory and that's all it is.
 
Stone said:
While you (and I) might have been tinkering with extra parts machines and whatnot it just seems that he would have a nice, new factory assembled 286 to play on.
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Written like somebody who never tried to live on an IBM salary. IBM didn't pay well. But you did get a title ...

In all seriousness, IBM employees could get hardware at a small discount. But given the expense of these machines back then, they would be just as likely to be cobbling things out of spare parts as we would be. They would just have a better support network if something went wrong. Back in those days (up until very recently even) IBM ran what were comparable to bulletin boards internally for employees. The were hosted on a VM machine and we called them forums, and the format looked a lot like Usenet news. They were a great source of information, especially the internal juicy tidbits that often did not make it outside.
 
Bidding has gone over my maximum and I will not raise my bid. 5 minutes left. If one of you gets it, please let us know what the contents of the drive are.
 
Stone said:
Mike, don't take this personally because that's not how it's meant. While I can't say with any degree of certainty I just don't believe that you and Jerry O. were in comparable positions some 20 - 25 years ago. While you (and I) might have been tinkering with extra parts machines and whatnot it just seems that he would have a nice, new factory assembled 286 to play on.
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Well, as Mike B. points out there is the 'shoemaker's children going barefoot' syndrome and engineers also like to proudly cobble together their very personal systems out of what they can find.

I was selling systems in those days and certainly had access to different hardware effectively for free, but in the PC/XT days a 5161 with an upgraded power supply and a 12MHz clone board was better and faster than a PC or XT and not much different from a 6MHz AT, and a good way to make use of an otherwise unsaleable box.
 
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Cool. Best of luck to them. Are they aware of this site for comments/questions? What would be interesting (although unethical lol) would be imaging the drive as is, then searching for deleted data.
 
barythrin said:
Cool. Best of luck to them. Are they aware of this site for comments/questions? What would be interesting (although unethical lol) would be imaging the drive as is, then searching for deleted data.
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I don't think that would be unethical. That's how one looks at a drive, and people go through your stuff when you die - even your closet and wallet. That said, I strongly believe some discretion is in order - it always is. Respect is the key word here.
 
Sorry for jumping in on this so late.

I agree with you stone. This appears to be one of those units that used to be an expansion unit, but converted to an XT type of computer using a clone XT board.

And to answer soneone elses question, no, the expansion unit does not use a full board. Check out the pics I have of my expansion unit on my web pages at www.allthingsdos.com inder the media tab, and you'll see links to Alice. Under Alice you will find a photo set for the expansion unit rebuild. I have pics of the inside showing all of the primary required items that make the expansion unit what it is. The IBM 5161expansion unit uses a planar instead of a full system board. Aside from that, there are typically either one or 2 hard disk drives, some ISA expansion cards of the users choice, and a power supply to supply juice to everything internal to the expansion unit. What really makes the expansion unit what it is, are the extender and receiver cards, connected together via a 64 pin cable. That cable is really a thick beast too.

Sorry if my post is redundant.


Stone said:
It has an XT motherboard in it and I don't think it's even an IBM 5160 board.
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Ole Juul said:
I don't think that would be unethical. That's how one looks at a drive, and people go through your stuff when you die - even your closet and wallet. That said, I strongly believe some discretion is in order - it always is. Respect is the key word here.
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There was a mistake transferring the data -- the data is intact but all the file dates are reset. The winner bidder is going through some family issues at the moment and will not be able to redump any time soon. There does not appear to be any significantly personal files on the drive apart from a login/password to a system that was shut down decades ago.

The data is online at ftp.oldskool.org in /pub/misc/Software. A quick search of the string "IBM Internal Use" finds roughly a dozen files, most of which are small utilities (this is in line with the XT-286 I got from an IBM employee 15 years ago, the contents of which I will post when I have a chance to drag it out and archive it).

The bidder confirmed it was close to what we thought it was. "I don't even know if the machine works or not. When I got it, there weren't any HD cables connected to the HD. I ended up putting the Ovesen HD into my XT to get everything off of it. I think someone on VC posted a comment that perhaps the computer was put together by one of his grandchildren. That could be a possibility, nothing inside the computer was hooked up or any of the screws were put in place. The last file dates on the contents of the HD was dated 1/1/2012."
 
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