5150 - a few beginner questions

Hi all,
I have recently acquired an IBM 5150 with 1 5.25" floppy and an internal hard disk. It's in good working order, but the HDD contains only *boring* software. Having no way to write floppies for this thing, I'm a bit stuck...

I have no comms software for it, is there a way to do serial transfers from DOS?

Is there a way to get into BASIC from DOS without BASICA being on the drive?

luddite said:

Hi all,
I have recently acquired an IBM 5150 with 1 5.25" floppy and an internal hard disk. It's in good working order, but the HDD contains only *boring* software. Having no way to write floppies for this thing, I'm a bit stuck...

I have no comms software for it, is there a way to do serial transfers from DOS?

Is there a way to get into BASIC from DOS without BASICA being on the drive?

Click to expand...

No solutions that can instantly be applied. However, there are several solutions I can think of off the top of my head which you could explore given time and inclination.

The quickest is to get hold of a few 5.25 inch floppies and (borrow?) a machine with a 5.25 inch drive. Even if it has a 1.2 MB drive you should be able to format a readable disk and transfer software that way. One of the first things you should transfer is a comms program which will allow file transfer over the serial port (assuming one is fitted).

Other avenues to explore if you are adventurous is to see if you can find a BASICA comms program somewhere and see if you can save it to cassette (or MP3 player) via the sound card and load it in over the cassette port. Then save it to disk. Then use it to load in other files. Don't ask me about specifics on this..I haven't done it. I'm just saying theoretically you should be able to do it.

If you can find a listing, or write a program yourself perhaps you could manually enter (type in) a simple file transfer comms program to load a good one over (say Procomm).

As I say, I haven't done any of these so I don't know specifics. Google is your friend though, and you should be able to find info somewhere.

Tez

Another way is to install a 1.44MB 3.5" drive on the 5150 and write 2D (720K) format disks on your normal PC. You may need an edge-to-header adapter for the drive cable, but that should be fairly easy to find.

I don't have one of the machines, but if the goal is just to get into BASIC, couldn't the OP remove their hard drive controller card? With no floppy in the drive and no hard drive card, it should boot to BASIC in ROM (given it's an IBM).

Another easy and inexpensive solution is to use an Iomega parallel Zip drive if you have ms dos 5.0 or above on your machine.

Can't you just type "system" to get to cassette basic? It should be in ROM. If it is a 5150 there should be what looks like 2 keyboard DIN connectors on the back, one is really a cassette port.

Kipp

There have been many posts in these forums about transferring software from new computers to old computers (and vice-versa). For example: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?13430

Since that thread, I have moved to the solution of using a ZIP drives on my 'modern day' computers and for my old computers (including a 5150), parallel port ZIP100 drives and palmZIP software (palmZIP provides access to ZIP100 drives on 8088 based computers, even with early versions of DOS).
With that solution, I can transfer a lot of data in an acceptable-to-me period of time. It works for me.

palmZIP can be purchased (for small cost) from Klaus at http://leute.server.de/peichl/palmzipe.htm

kishy said:

I don't have one of the machines, but if the goal is just to get into BASIC, couldn't the OP remove their hard drive controller card? With no floppy in the drive and no hard drive card, it should boot to BASIC in ROM (given it's an IBM).

Click to expand...

I had thought about that, but I guess I was hoping for solution that would provide fewer opportunities for me to fubar the machine ;-)

luddite said:

Hi all,
...
I have no comms software for it, is there a way to do serial transfers from DOS?
...

Click to expand...

If you have a null modem cable and the PC has the MODE command available you can upload (and then run) the Interlink programs; No need to open the box.

(The files on your 'server' have to be accessible to DOS of course (i.e. one of the FAT filesystems)