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Your favorite IBM 5150 reflections, historical facts, technical trivia and scuttlebut

dmemphis

dmemphis

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2014
Messages
262
Location
Pottstown, PA
I was unsure that this might belong in the history forum, but
since it is machine specific, I chose here, plus I really
want an audience with 5150 enthusiasts. Pardon the faux pas if
this isn't quite right etiquette.
Thanks in advance!

Wild stuff will have to be vetted or reference provided! :)
 
I remember my 5150; miserably underpowered thing, almost painful to use with 64KB and one SS floppy drive. I had various CP/M machines that worked much better. After DOS 2.0 came out, I expanded the thing with a Quadram card and my own SA-1000 hard disk setup and things were a bit better. Eventually I jettisoned the thing for a cheap XT clone and then a PC AT clone.
 
Not so Modern

Not so Modern

I swear I was born 30 years ahead of my time, of course I think part of that has to do with being raised by much older grandparents; early 70's and early 80's.

When I was in high school 1995-1999 there was an interesting schism. The computer science department was all Apple. Apple IIc's when I entered "middle school" but LC 580's without CD-ROM connected to a Power PC based server. The business department however was PC and way behind. Mind you most of my business classes happened in my junior and senior year, so 98 & 99' however that year the machines were mostly IBM PS'2 Model 25's, a 486/33 clone, and a Pentium 75 clone. The reflection of course comes from the fact that I chose to use way in the back of the room with the 5150 with single 5.25 and aftermarket hard disk to do my work. Unfortunately since the senior-itis was so bad I almost failed. Still, best classroom experience since no one was going to steal my work. The PS/2's and the clones had 3.5" only.

The software we used mostly was Electric Pencil (FUN!) and PFS: First Choice 2.0 (also FUN!)
 
How about things like this:

According to a widely quoted account of by Bill Gates, one such found here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=l...t8CH4Q6AEIVTAJ#v=onepage&q=8088 video&f=false

The 5150 motherboard allegedly took only 40 days to design once the 8088 was chosen as the processor.
The designer, Lou Eggebrecht, authored the book "Interfacing to the IBM PC" and today is a board member of Broadcom/Avago.
 
There are many stories about the IBM PC development.
Mark Dean's explanation of the choice of Intel over others can be heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYPwVOUcCnc

Some years ago, there was a retrospective involving members of the team responsible for actually building the prototype IBM PC but I can't find a link to it now.
 
I was very young when I first experienced the IBM 5150. At the time I didn't even know what it was called besides computer because I was so young. It was not the first computer I ever used, that would be the commodore 64. However the IBM was the first computer that made an impression on me enough to want to get into computers.

The computer its self was a gift from one of my mothers co workers. The lady was a doctor and she could afford expensive things like that. She gave it to us because we had nothing and by then the 5150 was way outdated. It came with the monitor, keyboard, printer, tons of paper, and a printer paper box full of 5.25 floppies. Some of my earliest video gaming memories were on that computer with things such as sokoban, jeopardy, chess, and wheel of fortune. We always treated that computer like a gem. We went to great trouble to keep it clean and dust free. It even came with these rubberized plastic dust covers for everything.

Unfortunately my parents finally got rid of it when they got a more modern computer :( . They replaced it with a Micron with a pentium II in it and windows 95. That computer is also nostalgic for me but that is beyond the scope of this post.
 
I grew up in a country that rarely spotted an IBM outside of a large corporation, and was a few years late, but through the 90's I became quite the PC enthusiast and started digging in to the history more, my first collectible was an IBM 5160 (not a 5150) this would've only been around 2001.

I wrote to IBM asking for more information about the original IBM PC and the PC XT, and I actually got a package in the mail. They sent me several original product photo prints and a letter thanking me for my interest.

I've since lost the letter, but that's a memory that will stick with me for a long time. The photographs are framed around my computer room in the house.
 
I worked at IBM in Boca Raton in the mid 80's and knew many of folks who worked on the development of the 5150 PC. I learned that many of the 5150 manuals contained "easter eggs" put in by the people who authored or edited the manuals in the form of code samples that contained the names of actual people and places important to those who worked on the project.
For example, the BASIC manual contains many code samples that reference Boca Raton and Delray Beach and other addresses and names of real places and people. Many of the numbers used in the examples are the ages, birthdays, or street numbers important to the authors.
Rick
 
d5aa96 said:
I worked at IBM in Boca Raton in the mid 80's and knew many of folks who worked on the development of the 5150 PC. I learned that many of the 5150 manuals contained "easter eggs" put in by the people who authored or edited the manuals in the form of code samples that contained the names of actual people and places important to those who worked on the project.
For example, the BASIC manual contains many code samples that reference Boca Raton and Delray Beach and other addresses and names of real places and people. Many of the numbers used in the examples are the ages, birthdays, or street numbers important to the authors.
Rick
Click to expand...

That is real neat. The 80's will always be my favorite decade and some-days I would like to live it again...
 
d5aa96 said:
I worked at IBM in Boca Raton in the mid 80's and knew many of folks who worked on the development of the 5150 PC. I learned that many of the 5150 manuals contained "easter eggs" put in by the people who authored or edited the manuals in the form of code samples that contained the names of actual people and places important to those who worked on the project.
For example, the BASIC manual contains many code samples that reference Boca Raton and Delray Beach and other addresses and names of real places and people. Many of the numbers used in the examples are the ages, birthdays, or street numbers important to the authors.
Rick
Click to expand...

That's a real treat. Thanks exactly what I was looking for. I'll try to look some of those up.
If you come by any direct references please pass them along.
 
I worked in a Big Blue mainframe programming lab as a new hire and received one of the first PCs that came off the line. After playing with it for a week I was asked by my lab management what I thought of it, and I replied, half joking "Our 3081 had a baby - and its going to eat its mother" A few short years later I realized that my assessment was no joke as mainframe sales plummeted while companies shifted their budgets to buy PCs by the truckload.
 
Yes, the original machine was unimpressive at best, which is why I bought an Epson QX-10*, with that lovely 640x400 monographics monitor, 256Kb of ram when the PC still only came with 64, and two 380K floppy drives! The keyboard was very nice as well. When I finally bought a PC compatible (Compaq Portable) the keyboard layout drove me nuts. The Portable was nice, but I discovered that Compaq wasn't hardware compatible. Shoulda bought an XT. Eventually ended up with an XT "turbo" clone. Ran a fidonet BBS on that for a fair amount of time.

Interesting tidbit about the QX-10 keyboard: the layout bears a strong resemblance to the later Model M 104-key layout... :)




*At the time I was unfamiliar with the saying "no one ever got fired for buying IBM."
 
On the other hand, in 1983, the QX-10 with 256k was a $3,000 system while the 64K IBM PC was a $1,300* machine. Adding drives and memory resulted in a system that fairly closely matched the fully loaded QX-10 in both price and specs but the lack of Valdocs was probably the biggest advantage of the IBM PC.

* Price cuts thanks to the introduction of the XT.
 
br44 said:
I was very young when I first experienced the IBM 5150. At the time I didn't even know what it was called besides computer because I was so young. It was not the first computer I ever used, that would be the commodore 64. However the IBM was the first computer that made an impression on me enough to want to get into computers.
Click to expand...

For me the PC made the opposite impact.
We've had a C64 since 1984 or so, and at around 1988 my dad bought a PC clone. It was an 8088 at 4.77 MHz with 640k, 2x 5.25" DD drives, no HDD and Hercules graphics. I later found out that it had a 'turbo' as well, allowing it to run at 9.54 MHz. But my initial impression would have been very similar to what a 5150 or 5160 would be like.
And I found it rather underwhelming compared to the C64. It felt sluggish, and everything was very 'dusty' and 'industrial'. We later got a color monitor, because we found that the video adapter was also compatible with CGA and Plantronics. But that didn't really improve my impression. The ugly 4 colours were no match for what I was used to on my C64. And it was just terrible at most games, with no sprite hardware, and no ability to scroll. And don't get me started about the 'sound' :)
I never quite understood why it was so successful.

Real IBMs were not that common here. But I eventually got one about 2 years ago (a 5160), when I went back to my roots, and needed a 100% compatible machine for 8088 MPH.
Up to then I used two clones, a Philips P3105 (which we had in school when I was young), and a Commodore PC20-III (basically the same as my first PC, which was a PC10-III, aside from having a HDD onboard).
 
d5aa96 said:
I worked at IBM in Boca Raton in the mid 80's and knew many of folks who worked on the development of the 5150 PC. I learned that many of the 5150 manuals contained "easter eggs" put in by the people who authored or edited the manuals in the form of code samples that contained the names of actual people and places important to those who worked on the project.
For example, the BASIC manual contains many code samples that reference Boca Raton and Delray Beach and other addresses and names of real places and people. Many of the numbers used in the examples are the ages, birthdays, or street numbers important to the authors.
Rick
Click to expand...
And in the DOS manual they frequently used "FOO.BAR" as an example file name. As a young kid when I first read that, the reference totally flew over my head...
 
vwestlife said:
And in the DOS manual they frequently used "FOO.BAR" as an example file name. As a young kid when I first read that, the reference totally flew over my head...
Click to expand...

Keep in mind that "FOO.BAR" doesn't really link to FUBAR - at least in this kind of computer reference. (google "foo bar baz") :)

g.
 
My favorite "easter egg" related to the 5150 is the same thing we exploited in 8088 MPH: CGA's 80-column text mode does not force disabling the color burst signal on the composite video output. By all rights it should, since 80-column text is nearly unreadable with it turned on, but for some reason it isn't forced off. VileR used that quirk to paint some pretty amazing 1000-color images by exploiting the color artifacting present in that video mode combination.

My second-favorite is how the PC speaker can be tied to PIT channel 2. By doing this, the PC could not only output a square wave independently from CPU control (ie. it keeps playing in the background), but the PIT has a 1-shot mode that allows you to pulse the speaker at very short intervals, which you can abuse to produce some crude pulse-width modulation. This combination allows you to reliably and consistently produce sampled sound output from the speaker, albeit at a low volume.

I've always wondered how intentional the speaker/PIT stuff was; I've ordered Eggebrecht's book and hope I'll find an answer in there. If not, I might track him down to ask him personally.
 
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