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A Very Very Rare IBM Adapter Card

willmurray461

Experienced Member
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Jun 11, 2018
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303
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Boca Raton, FL
I bought this manual a while back from a seller on eBay thinking it was for my IBM 3270 PC, but after reading it, I found out it was for a rare IBM card that I had never heard about before. It's called the IBM 3270 Personal Computer Attachment, and allowed you to use a 3278 terminal as a monitor and networking device for your 5150, along with allowing a 3278 keyboard to be used with your PC. The adapter connected to a breakout box which split three ways. Cables would attach on one end to the breakout box and to the terminal in two places and the 3278 keyboard on the other. The 3278 terminal needed to have the special IBM 3278 Personal Computer Adapter option installed in order to communicate with the card. The manual seems to be a very old one from the early days of the PC. It came in a light gray binder like other early IBM documentation, only references PC DOS 1.1, and all pictures of the 5150 are the early revision A models with the (RS-232? I think it is.) port cover. My guess is it was immediately replaced by the 3278 emulation cards. It came with some software labeled "Data Transfer: VM/CMS," "Data Transfer: TSO," and "Customization." All are version 1.00 copyright IBM 1982. The manual also has some schematics which detail exactly how the card works. If someone wanted to, it looks like they could recreate the card if they wanted from the documentation in this book. There's a lot of other technical documentation I can't understand, diagnostics, data transfer, translation, and encoding, but maybe someone else could understand it when I convince myself to scan the whole thing. I would love to see one of these things one day. Hopefully the vintage computer community can track one of these down. Or maybe, someone already has one of these. It sounds pretty awesome to be able to use a 3278 as a display, and a "beamspring" keyboard with a 5150.

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Please image those disks when you can. Although, from your photos, are those indents on just the labels or are the disks damaged?
 
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Ok, the cardinal rule of disk imaging is *just do it*. Don't read the directory, just created the image. Sometimes disks will only read off their data once. Have your imaging box setup. If you need to practice on some some inconsequential floppies, do that. I've had it happen, I ain't lying. You piddle around with an old rare disk, you may lose it ...
 
Ok, the cardinal rule of disk imaging is *just do it*. Don't read the directory, just created the image. Sometimes disks will only read off their data once. Have your imaging box setup. If you need to practice on some some inconsequential floppies, do that. I've had it happen, I ain't lying. You piddle around with an old rare disk, you may lose it ...

I usually keep a 360k and 1.2mb "test diskette" handy somewhere to verify a drive can read and not damage things before I go trying to do one-off floppies. That way I'm positive I know the drive is good to go and if not well it's a test disk I can replace instead of an unobtanium one, but you should be keeping your drives clean anyways. ;)
 
Agreed. I also use cleaning diskettes with alcohol between disk reads and the "test diskette" idea that NeXT mentioned.

Going through a box of over 100 Wang disks at the moment, all with stuff growing on them, fun times!
 
I hate seeing mold on floppies (5.25"), you know you will gum up the heads and strip oxide if you use them.
 
I hate seeing mold on floppies (5.25"), you know you will gum up the heads and strip oxide if you use them.

Is there any (practical) way to remove crud from the surface of a floppy without destroying the emulsion and the data encoded in it?

We talk a lot about how to clean heads of crud shed onto them by an old floppy. Just seems like there might be a way to dodge that bullet, especially if it is a floppy that has stuff on it that you really really want to recover.
 
Terry Stewart did a write up a while ago https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2009-02-21-retrieving-data-using-soap-and-water.htm

Not really super quick, but if you need that data you can get it.

For little old impatient me, if it's not too bad, I try my luck with a Teac drive I have that has a soft loading head - keeping the head away from the surface until it's time to read - using that drive + lots of disk cleans in between - I get lucky most of the time but there is always that risk of it building up and tearing off a track.
 
It's not the heads that destroy the disks -- it's the disks that foul the heads. These disks have had the coating deteriorate and it's waiting to come off at the earliest opportunity. Fortunately, the heads can be cleaned and the drives are not lost.
 
Yes, the two data transfer disks have write protect notches cut out. I don't know why. The "Customization" disk does not, however. Most of the disks I bought from this guy had write protect notches, even though they were important system disks. They belonged to an engineer, so they might have been edited by him. Unfortunately, I can't seem to read the "Data Transfer: VM/CMS" disk. Although, I believe this might be because it isn't formatted for DOS. I think the manual mentioned something like that. I'll look into it. It would be very strange to have two of the disks read but not the third. The drive I used was a known working Tandon TM-100-2A. I'll get around to imaging them as soon as I take the drive out and plug it into my Windows 95 machine. Also, if anyone finds anything related to this card, please tell me and take a picture of it.
 
I might mail Mr. Kossow the disks if he wants to archive them, but Northern California is too far for me to drive unless I have any other reason to be up there. I didn't know who he was until now, but after looking his name up I see he's the curator of software at the Computer History Museum. I really liked visiting the CHM. I saw their 1401 exhibit and it was pretty impressive. It's probably a good idea to send this to a museum. Also, I checked all the disks on my other machine and they read fine. My Tandon drive just needed to be dusted. Hadn't been in over 30 years.
 
3270 emulation cards didn't come around until a couple years after this. It didn't sell well for an entirely different set of reasons.
 
Interesting. It was in an 5161 expansion chassis. So I guess that means that at some point it was connected to a PC 3270.
 
If someone bought a 3270 PC and also wanted to use it as a PC I can see that happening because the full boardset was either four or five cards, plus the floppy controller and then another slot for a serial/parallel/sixpack I/O card so it left you otherwise with no slot expansion.
 
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