• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Hyperventilating - Just brought home PC 5150 in original boxes from original owner

A

Anonymous Freak

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 9, 2007
Messages
762
Location
Cascadia
Found on Craigslist - he was severely over-asking, but after emailing back and forth, he admitted he did it solely to weed out people who don't actually appreciate the system as a historical artifact, -'d sold it for far less.

What it includes is amazing though, and probably was worth his original asking price.

IBM PC 5150 (with original box, including shipping label with the name of the person I bought it from.) - original planar. Upgraded later to 64 KB onboard and add-in card to 512 KB.
*CUSTOM* ROM chip - by his employer of the time, that replaced onboard BASIC with an APL interpreter. Original ROM chip included.
Floppy controller with dual 360 KB full-height floppies.
IBM MDA adapter
IBM CGA adapter
Serial/parallel adapter

IBM 5151 MDA display with original box (again, with shipping label made out to him.)

IBM 5153 CGA display with original box (yup, shipping label.)

IBM Model F keyboard (yup, original box.)

Hayes 1200 baud modem (no box.)

Okidata dot matrix printer with original box.

A box of cables, manuals, and software. Including the original "green eyes" Microsoft Mouse, and Windows 1.0 original floppies and manual.

I'll get it all set up and properly photographed, but sitting waiting for my kid's football practice to end, so had to write this up.
 
If I can find a way - I have no other systems with a working 360K-capable floppy drive at the moment, nor any easy mass-storage for the PC!
 
Oh man, you've gotta post up some pictures! Sounds like a great setup.

My 5150 also came from the original owner, who was also asking a lot of $$$ for the set. However, it came with a really cool Quadram Quadlink expansion card (basically turns the 5150 into an Apple II) complete with the box and all the goodies. So, it was worth it in the end.

Looking forward to seeing your update!
 
Anonymous Freak said:
If I can find a way - I have no other systems with a working 360K-capable floppy drive at the moment, nor any easy mass-storage for the PC!
Click to expand...
Well, you've got a serial port - if you can hack up a little utility to read data from 0xF000:6000-DFFF and dump it to COM1 in hex format, it should be fairly simple to pick it up with a terminal program on the other end of a null-modem cable. I think this should do the job (NASM format):
Code: 
	cpu 8086
	org 0x100
	
	; Initialize serial port
	; Serial parameters: 0xE3 %11100011 (9600/8/N/1)
	mov ax,0x00e3
	xor dx,dx	; I'm assuming port 0 is COM1?
	int 0x14
	
	; Set up read loop
	mov ax,0xf000	; Segment 0xF000
	mov ds,ax
	mov si,0x6000	; beginning at 0x6000
	mov cx,0x8000	; for 32KB
	
	mov bx,btable	; Point to our character table
	
lp:	lodsb		; Get a byte
	push ax		; Save it
	
	shr al,1	; Do the high nybble first
	shr al,1
	shr al,1
	shr al,1
	cs xlatb	; Turn a hex nybble into a character
	call outchar	; Output it
	
	pop ax		; Now the low nybble
	and al,0x0f
	cs xlatb	; Make it a character
	call outchar
	
	mov al,0x20	; Add a space for readability
	call outchar
	
	loop lp		; Now continue until done
	
	mov ah,0x4c	; Quit the program
	int 0x21
	
outchar:		; Output a character in AL to the serial port
	mov ah,0x01	; Send character
	xor dx,dx	; Port 0 = COM1
	int 0x14
	test ah,0x80	; If at first you don't succeed...
	jnz outchar	; ...try, try again!
	ret
	
btable:			; Lookup table for hex translation
	db "0123456789ABCDEF"

And, for entry in DEBUG, a hex dump of the resulting .COM file:
Code: 
B8 E3 00 31 D2 CD 14 B8
00 F0 8E D8 BE 00 60 B9
00 80 BB 43 01 AC 50 D0
E8 D0 E8 D0 E8 D0 E8 2E
D7 E8 13 00 58 24 0F 2E
D7 E8 0B 00 B0 20 E8 06
00 E2 E2 B4 4C CD 21 B4
01 31 D2 CD 14 F6 C4 80
75 F5 C3 30 31 32 33 34
35 36 37 38 39 41 42 43
44 45 46
 
Last edited:
Alright, took a few pics on my lunch break.

IMG_3439.jpg
Main PC unit and keyboard in original boxes stacked on top of each other. Vaguely visible are the shipping labels that sent it to the seller's employer, then to him.

IMG_3426.jpg
Inside of unit, showing top of floppy disk drives and expansion cards.

IMG_3424.jpg
Close-up of 8088 CPU and 8087 FPU.

IMG_3438.jpg
"Green Eye" Microsoft Mouse.
 
Excellent find, congratulations! Definitely try and get that ROM dumped, who knows if there are any more extant copies.
 
Yup, easy enough if you can get the 5150 booted--just use DEBUG to make the hex file and shove it out the serial port.

Just curious, is the keyboard that came with this an APL keyboard? That would make it a very uncommon bird indeed.
 
Standard keyboard, not APL.

Those suggesting I just put an EXE on a disk and run it - that's the problem, I have no way of getting anything on to a 360K floppy at the moment. I wish there was an "ADT Pro" like app for old PCs. Something where you just enter a couple commands in the built-in BASIC to "bootstrap" booting over serial or cassette port. Ironically, I do have a SCSI dual-5.25"-floppy (one 360k and one 1.2M drive) external device that came with a Mac I bought recently, but it's missing its power cord! (And of course uses a nonstandard power connector.)

Using DEBUG to enter and send to serial port sounds good.

And I'll probably be getting an XT-IDE soon anyway, that will make moving files back and forth a *LOT* easier.
 
Okay, went and booted it up during my break again. Here you go, running Windows on dual monitors! (Okay, the DOS prompt is displaying on one, and Windows on the other.)

IMG_3448.jpg

Sadly, I forgot about the need to move some jumpers on the motherboard to have it recognize the third floppy drive, so I'll have to do that later.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top