IBM 5150 prices?

[Yzzerdd]

Since I found me a working 5150 and have done research, I find they didn't come with a hard drive. You had to buy your own as well as video card.

I think in the very beginning of the 5150 you did indeed have to purchase a video card(or was it a non-standard option?), but later I'm fairly certain a monochrome video card was indeed standard on it.

--Ryan

 

[Micom 2000]

"double-height FDD"? I'm sure you meant full-height.

Yes, I did. A memory lag.

"
The 5150 motherboard BIOS is devoid of hard disk support. For the first two BIOS revisions (which do not support ROM BIOS extensions), a hard drive could be added, but one needed a special boot diskette. See the custom solution at http://www.selectric.org/old5150/index.html for an example. Think of it as 'hard disk support software' on the diskette.
With the move to the 64-256K motherboard, a third revision of the BIOS was released, and that BIOS supports ROM BIOS extensions. ROM BIOS extensions allowed the diskette based 'hard disk support software' to be moved to a ROM on the hard disk controller.

In summary:
* All 5150 (and 5160) BIOS' don't support hard disks.
* The BIOS' supplied on the 16-64K 5150 motherboard forces one to use a custom 'boot diskette' based hard disk solution.
* The BIOS' supplied on the 64-256K 5150 motherboard allows the use of a hard disk controller that contains a ROM BIOS extension.

IBM released a BIOS upgrade kit for owners of 5150s with 16-64K motherboards. It appears to have been a common upgrade.

I must have been lucky as all my PCs (and XTs) had hdds, with a controller, of course. I remember my first PC (or XT) had a faulty MFM controller and I had to pay thru the nose to get another, sometime in the late 80s..

Lawrence

 

[JohnElliott]

I'm not sure why or where I read it but the ones that were going for a bunch ($100+ and yes as it was pointed out it was a few years ago) had F1-F10 on the left and had to have a SysRq key. I really don't know why or what the big deal was. No system request key and it wasn't worth a ton. Ditto if it wasn't the left side function keys. I don't know if it was just because it was the original IBM PC keyboard and the others are XT/AT or what.

The ones with a SysRQ key are from the 5170 AT and can be used on modern PCs with a simple adaptor. The ones without are from the 5150 or 5160 and would need a custom-built converter (kbdbabel or similar).