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The 1903 Wright Flyer was indeed a pretty crappy airplane. But showed that heavier than air flight was possible. Within a few short years orders of magnitude improvements in the state of the art made the Flyer look like a joke. My Ender 3 was a cheap piece of crap out of the box.. The...

The two drives that won't play nice with others are from Western Digital. One CF card that refuses to be a DOS boot device is from SanDisk. Pretty sure those are respected brands. I "cheated" a bit when I bought a set on ebay consisting of an XT-IDE card, a short (6 inch?) 40 conductor IDE...

I have a PC/XT (IBM 5160) with a Glitchworks XT-IDE card, a 40 conductor cable, and two IDE-CF adapters, one configured as the master and one as the slave. One CF card works just fine as the C: drive, the other as the D: drive. I'm able to boot just about any DOS version I've tried simply by...

That cap is not required for the machine to boot and/or run. Hook up the rest of whatever you disconnected and see if it powers up.

Later versions of MSDOS came on higher density (1.2M or 1.44M) media with a post card you could mail off to get the lower density (360K or 720K) media. Some of those images are still available on the web but good luck getting 6.22 images for 360K media. The ones I have come across so far are...

You're going to find its often a case of "You can't get there from here. You have to go someplace else first." One thing to look in to is building yourself a "tweener" i.e. a machine that you can equip with various types of floppy drives and copy stuff back and forth from one format floppy to...

"IMSAI 8080: Do you want to play a game ?" I liked the "WarGames" reference. https://www.imsai.net/the-wargames-imsai/ "A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY. HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?"

You obviously only need the guide on a slot with a long card. I can't recall ever seeing a 5150 or 5160 with a guide installed for every slot. I'm guessing IBM saved a couple of cents on each machine by only putting the guide where they were putting a long card. At any rate, be careful trying...

"About re-producing PDP-11/70" Get two PDP-11/70s. Put them close together. Put on some mood music & dim the lights. ============ Years ago "Byte" did one of their first issues focused on AI. A few issues later some of the readers' comments showed up in the letters column. One that...

I would add that if you're inserting a "full length" card, put it in a slot where you already have the plastic guide installed in the front of the case. Those guides can be tricky to move from slot to slot given the brittleness of 40 year old plastic.

I have half height drives or equivalents in both bays of my 5160. No such frame required. But if you're trying to match a factory configuration you might want one. Seems like something that could be easily 3D printed. Someone who has one should post some measurements and/or photos. I've...

Don't forget, back in the day, when S-100 machines were the big kids on the block, there were reasons why the 5150 & 5160 changed everything in a very, very short time. Tinker very much with the machine your friend left you and you'll no doubt find out what some of those reasons were.

When I first joined what was known as The Bell System in 1971, the network was primarily analog but could be tricked into handling a small amount of digital. When I retired in 2004, reality was almost the exact opposite. Even voice traffic was sliced and diced into bits before going much of...

Is the answer still "42"?

Word to the wise: Running an RX02 for very long without the fan is not a good idea. I left mine running an XXDP diagnostic to exercise it while I took a dinner break. The room was air conditioned and the fan was running normally. However, a sticker inside the plenum took that opportunity to...

On a 5150, the motherboard by itself should be enough load to start the PSU. In the minimum diagnostic configuration, that's all you have plus a speaker. I'd go back and carefully follow the steps indicated by your symptoms: Your power supply fan runs but you did not hear the beep. Just put...

I had a brief period of contact with a UNIVAC 11/80. It wasn't all that unusual to be doing something and get a message displayed about a DISK REPACK. And you go to cool your jets while the machine did just exactly that: it repacked the disk to recover the holes between files..

The threads in most (all?) full height 5.25" floppy drives are SAE #6-32. The length is 3/8"most of the time. YMMV.

My 5150 has a Hercules clone card that feeds an MCE2VGA that in turn feeds a generic flat screen VGA monitor. Works great.

Complete vintage computer gear tends to be bulky, heavy, and fragile. That makes shipping a complete unit a pain for all concerned. I've seen eBay sellers mention they no longer deal in complete units. Instead, they strip out the cards, sell them, and scrap the chassis. We've all seen the...