your favorite PC with an IBM brand on it

[linuxlove]

mine is my thinkpad 360Ce. yours?

 

[Jorg]

I think my AT. I was spoiled putting behind one in 1988 during my trainee time, with nothing to do but play with it.

 

[creepingnet]

I know this is old but it has to be

Desktop: IBM PC-330 6571-xxx - The 486 variant of the Select-A-Bus IBM PC-330 series
Laptop: IBM ThinkPad 755CD - This was like a PC-330 stuffed into a laptop

 

[marcoguy]

Ibm pc xt 5160

 

[fatwizard]

I'm with Macroguy. My old PC XT 5160. IBM DOS 3.3 640K motherboard, CGA with my 5153 monitor, 360K 5.25 HH and 1.44 M floppy drives, and the trusty IBM WD25 20 Meg hard drive. Plus a Seagate ST01 SCSI contoller and an external 250 Meg drive in case the the WD25 isn't so trusty after all.

 

[wangermuller]

IBM 5170 original configuration:80286 and 80287,512KB expanded to 1.5MB, 8MHZ, 1.2MB and 360KB FDDs. 10 MB HDD,IBM EGA card, IBM5154 screen. DOS 5.0

 

[PeterNC]

IBM PS/ValuePoint desktops.

 

[Caluser2000]

All my IBMs have fallen over and been junked except for my PC 300GL with windows 98 gold on it. That just keeps on trucken.

 

[PeterNC]

I am now looking for a 300, Aptiva or NetVista P3 to play WarCraft III on.

 

[MykeLawson]

RT/PC 6150. We had an extra one in our lab when a program ended and I adopted it to use in my office. I had that beast tricked out. 6091 display, external 1.2 Meg floppy, 6157 tape drive, three internal 310 MB ESDI drives, and at some point I had it hooked up to a 9332 SCSI drives. All on a 16M token ring. It was a beast and I wish I still had it.

 

[VERAULT]

IBM 704 of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_700/7000_series

 

[bsd64]

I wish I still had it.

I always felt a bit nostalgic for the IBM 5155 portable that I owned while at college. Slow, heavy, monochrome - but with a great keyboard. It was a little out-dated even then, but at that time everyone typically used the computer lab - very few students in the dorm had their own computers. The computer lab had the choice of Word or Word Perfect. Why would anyone use Word? Glaring background, slow, busy toolbar, endless font and formatting choices. I liked the visual simplicity of the Word Perfect 5.1 interface (forget about the function keys for a second.. and that's the only choice that ran on my PC. I don't remember the DOS version.

Anyway - if you miss your computer - you can try to recreate it! My old computer has long ago been parted out, but recently I took a chance on one from an eby auction and actually lucked out (you never really know how much rust...) But this one was super clean and was decked out with a six-pack plus card giving it 640k, two 360k floppy drives, and surprisingly also had a math co-processor (not even mentioned in the ad). Pretty slick!

I picked up Dos 3.30, because I thought that was proper for the era. Honestly, I didn't remember how sparse early DOS versions were - no edit, no move, so that's been 'fun'. Also picked up two copies of WordPerfect 5.1 (first one had some bad disks) and an XT-IDE Deluxe card from Blue Lava Systems (ever heard of them...) to add a CF hard drive. I'd like to give a quick shout out to @modem7 for the resources he's compiled - I used them several times, but notably to get the astclock working and y2k compliant on the six-pack plus card, and also to @mbbrutman for his useful dskimage tool and site detailing how to work with the old floppy disks.

It's been fun going down memory lane and re-creating my favorite PC with an IBM badge. I still have my old hard drive from the original thats been in a drawer for 30 years. Not sure if it will still work, but at some point I'll pick up a controller card and check it out. Here's a few pictures:

 

[mbbrutman]

That's a nice machine - I love amber displays. And thanks for the shout-out, I'm happy you found those useful.

 

[Hak Foo]

Probably my defunct 385XD. It was my last term of university, and I had decided previously to use a laptop since my handwriting was abysmal. This was 2003, and even in a CS programme, there were only one or two people using one in lecture hall. I bought it from a shop that offered various used laptops with far too much of the stipend money; it was still hundreds cheaper than a new laptop, and better than the franken-486s I had tried the previous term. They included a big leatheroleum bag that I still use when travelling (if it would hold that brick, it can hold two modern laptops), and a printer that went pretty straight into the dustbin.

It ran Slackware well enough, and I upgraded it to the maximum 96Mb of memory it would take; I ended up getting settlement cheques related to price-fixing lawsuits on the RAM that mostly covered the cost of the upgrade. It was my first time using a proper Wi-Fi setup with a PCMCIA card, as the university had just rolled out limited 802.11b support, and getting it running on Slackware was an interesting quest: I seem to recall having to kick dhcpcd over every time I woke it from suspend.

It had pretty awful power management: they sold it to me with a dead battery so I got a brand-new aftermarket one out of them, and it lasted exactly long enough for 2.5 hours of note-taking. It only had four levels of battery state-- 100, 80, 10, and 0, as I recall, so you didn't get much room to control it.

It ended up sticking around too long for a serious Zangband addiction, and eventually spending a week or so at my first developer job in 2006 because they hadn't properly outfitted the office and needed *anything* with a screen and keyboard. Eventually it reported a fan-related error code, and the cost for replacing FRUs on a PII-266 machine with some Trackpoint damage to the screen was too much to justify.