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Problem with obtaining IBM 5153 monitor

romanon

romanon

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Joined
Oct 1, 2013
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672
Location
Slovakia
Hi, i am interesting of obtaining IBM 5153 monitor, but it is damn impossible to find it somewhere (for normal price). I am from Europe so i mean 220-240V version. Why it is so rare? I have two 5151 monitors with good condition, it wasnt so big problem find their. Was 5153's more expansive than 5151's in their ages? Or was made ​​less? Or more faulty?
 
The 5153 is not rare. I have two of them from ebay for 10€ each. Really rare are the IBM-5154 EGA monitors. If there is a device on ebay you have to pay 100€ an more for a 30 years old Monitor.
 
The 5153 was more expensive than the 5151, however IBM's sales in Europe were probably sluggish at first. IBM's took some time to manufacture keyboards with the layouts in the local language and PC-DOS was not very foreign language friendly until version 3.2 or so. Also, IBMs were expensive machines, so they tended to be bought by large corporations and governments, they were a bit out of reach for the individual/school/small business.

If a 220/240V 5153 exists, I wonder how well it comes with the 50Hz AC cycle when the monitor refreshes at 60Hz.
 
They seem to be getting few and far between, more so in some parts of the globe than others, The 5153 turns up on ebay UK now and again and is more commonly seen than the 5154, What i would say was rare is the 5175.
 
The reason they can be harder to find depends on the country. Here PCs didn't really take off in the home until the late 80's where clones were cheaper and faster. So most of the IBM's you see came from an office - which usually meant there is a 5151 to go with them.

Great Hierophant said:
If a 220/240V 5153 exists, I wonder how well it comes with the 50Hz AC cycle when the monitor refreshes at 60Hz.
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Mine works fine. No different to any videos I've seen of the US model.
 
Great Hierophant said:
If a 220/240V 5153 exists, I wonder how well it [copes] with the 50Hz AC cycle when the monitor refreshes at 60Hz.
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Well, as my 5153 has died and I am in the midst of troubleshooting, I can finally put that question to rest.
Other than the degaussing coil the TV chassis runs off a single supply of 115 VDC at 1/2 amp. There is no dependence on line frequency.
It's not immediately clear in the SAMs manual because they break-up the switch-mode PS into two schematics but in reality it's one board with a simple 110 VAC in and 115 VDC out.
If I could source or fabricate a 230 VAC to 115 VDC PS I could convert this over which would suit me perfectly. The line-based degaussing circuit would have be dealt with separately or disconnected.
 
Great Hierophant said:
IBM's sales in Europe were probably sluggish at first. IBM's took some time to manufacture keyboards with the layouts in the local language and PC-DOS was not very foreign language friendly until version 3.2 or so.

If a 220/240V 5153 exists, I wonder how well it comes with the 50Hz AC cycle when the monitor refreshes at 60Hz.
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As a European I don't recognise that.

We sold NLS keyboards and PC DOS (1.1) from day one - 1983 in Europe.

We sold lots of 5153s and still have lots of them in our Museum.
 
Couple of things:

Yes, European/230V 5153s existed, and there are survivors. The person ITT who bought theirs for a tenner each was extremely lucky. Some sellers of vintage gear regard their hardware as "very old, hence it should be cheap" and aren't maybe always informed of typical going rates. Of course, if there's an actual auction (not just Buy-it-now) on eBay (and if the seller has identified their HW correctly, with no typos, which is a factor in attracting bids), the current market value can still be determined, but even then things fluctuate from one auction to the next.
As far as I'm aware from when I last looked: On average, the 5153 today goes for several times more than €10, sometimes an order of magnitude more. It's true that by and large (230V) 5153s are much rarer, but that's relatively speaking.

Instead of getting even deeper into the opinion-fest (how rare is rare, really?), I'll remind myself that the OP asked this:

Why [is it] so rare? I have two 5151 monitors with good condition, it [wasn't] so big [a] problem [to] find [them]. [Were] 5153's more [expensive] than 5151's…? Or…made ​​less? Or more faulty?
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Here are some facts (which undoubtedly many here already know, but these facts should help answer the OP's questions).

  • The 5153 was only introduced in 1983, 2½ years after the introduction of the 5150/5151. Since 80-column text didn't look so nice on a TV, early (business) PC buyers would have bought 5151s by default.
  • While colour and graphical ability would have been an advantage, the 5153 only had 200 lines vertical resolution (and 640 horizontal pixels max.). That was built into the monitor's mask raster. The 5153 wasn't multiscan, and you weren't going to get more lines out of it. Consequentially, the 80×25 text characters only consisted of up to 8×8 (non-square) pixels each. That was less well-defined than the 720x350 resolution and 9×14 characters the 5151 offered.
  • While the MDA+5151 combo lacked graphics, the Hercules card, which was released prior to the 5153, had both the nicer MDA text mode and (monochrome) graphics, which was generally more important for business than colour and shittier text modes as offered by CGA+5153.
  • Dual-monitor systems were of course possible, but more expensive.
  • I have no figures on US domestic and international sales, but I have a hunch that way back then, the home market (115V) may have been bigger for the 5153.
While I don't have the actual respective sales figures, these are very good reasons why many buyers would have opted for a 5151 over a 5153. That makes the latter rarer today. I've also not seen 1337 demosceners and retrogaming programmers build any record-breaking Hercules graphics demos or new games in recent years, which means that among the likes of us, there's probably demand for the 5153 and maybe not so much for the 5151.

Demand and supply.

(I have no insight as to whether either 5151s or 5153s were more faulty than the others.)

In terms of buying a 5153 (and I'm not selling):

  • Speedy acquisition
  • Reasonably priced
  • Known good (=in working order)
—> Pick any two.
 
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Dual monitor systems (5151/5153) were comparatively common in the UK. (I had one but that's was really cheating because I got it due to my job.)

One of the mist common reasons for dual monitors was Lotus 1-2-3. One did text on the 5151 and graphics on the 5153. Add an IBM Printer and an IBM/HP plotter and one had a really top notch system.

BTW, the CGA card pre-dates the 5153. Until IBM announced a monitor, people used third-party products.

BTW2. Using the CGA to drive a TV was not an option in Europe because we didn't have NTSC TVs.

BTW3, I haven't seen a 5154 nor an EGA card since I handed mine over to my successor in 1986. Rocking horse manure doesn't come into it!
 
Beerhunter said:
Rocking horse manure doesn't come into it!
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I like your style! ;-)

(And because the OP seemed to possibly be a non-native speaker, I'll explain: Beerhunter meant that something very rare is in fact so rare, it doesn't even enter into the equation. The something very rare is "as rare as rocking horse manure", i.e. as rarely found as the manure of a rocking horse.)
 
Trixter said:
...yet.
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If that means what I think it might mean, then I foresee a need to procure a 5151 in my future. /giddy :)
…given that the parallel port card I'm buying already comes with a Hercules card onboard – or vice versa. ;-)

To return to the original problem, another thing the OP could try is to specifically use the eBay, etc. sites local to the countries most likely to have 230V 5153s (possibly the UK, according to the above). It turns out that even if you set eBay's search to Worldwide, other countries' versions of eBay don't actually always return all the results from a given country (UK in this case). It also can be useful to set up alerts. (Good thing that IBM 5153 is fairly specific.) I see this site's very own Marketplace also has a "recently listed" RSS feed. And search other classifieds, markets, etc., Good luck.
 
Btw., OP, there's also a company what makes a CGA/EGA compatible flatscreen monitor, and IIRC, I've seen a CGA-VGA adapter in the past.

PS: Yes, and yes. The former is extremely expensive though. Probably on the market with industrial applications in mind.
 
Trixter said:
ropersonline said:
Btw., OP, there's also a company what makes a CGA/EGA compatible flatscreen monitor, and IIRC, I've seen a CGA-VGA adapter in the past.
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For the record, those only handle the R, G, and B pins, not the I pin, so they only display 8 CGA colors instead of 16.
Click to expand...

Does "those" refer to the CGA-VGA adapters, that super-expensive LCD monitor, or both?
 
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