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IBM 5150 and PC-Dos 3.2

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NeuralNet

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Nov 25, 2009
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Hi, first time poster here.

I'm gonna be picking up an IBM 5150 next week. Its supposed to be in great condition.

I wanted to use it to develop some good BASIC and PASCAL core skills.

I just started learning about the 5150 but I seen it in the past because of the

relation to the 5100 and the whole John Titor thing.


I'm going to assume the 5150 will have PC-DOS 1.0.

Will I be able to load PC-DOS 3.2 if I acquire good floppy disk?

Any issues with that.

The reason being is some of the Pascal disk I see require an IBM PC

with DOS 3.2


Thanks for your help!
 
Unless you buy a machine from a museum, I'd think its rather unlikely that it still has DOS 1.0 installed.
At least part of its life it must have been an ordinary work horse, and I can't imagine that the DOS version wasn't upgraded.

Yes, it will load DOS 3.2 and higher- main concern will be the memory use for higher versions.
For this reason, one mostly uses the lowest version that fulfills the need.
Most popular is DOS 3.3 for PC's and XT's.

You'd need a good blank floppy and- more difficult sometimes, a way to transfer the disk image to your 5150 to write it to that floppy.
I hope you can find a more modern PC that has a 3,5" floppydrive or USB and also a 5.25" floppydrive.

Does it have a harddisk or is it completely original?
 
Good point.

Well, I will find out all the details very soon.

Its for a really good price (50 dollars) so Im jumping on it.

As soon as I know more or get it I will post pictures or a video.


I was already looking in on transferring files on it.

I considered getting a 386 or 486 machine that had a 5.25 floppy and 3.5 inch

drive. I saw a few on ebay. I think I will worry about it more when I get to

that point.


But more interestingly (and I was going to ask this at some point) I watched

a youtube video on someone who connected a 5100 to the internet

setting up a laptop as a PPP and connecting it to the 5100 with a rs232 to

usb adapter. I saw him make it to the google homepage.


Surely there must be a way to transmit data thru the rs232 out and upload

it somehow to another computer or even to your own email maybe?


I think maybe type "5100 connected to the internet" on youtube. i think that

was the title.
 
You'll probably want DOS 3.3 as per suggests. It's the best of the small ones. You can use a modem to connect to the internet - either internal or external, but a network card is lots of fun. I used to have an e-mail setup on a single 360K floppy, just so you know that's not a hard one. Also, I recently tried Nettamer which was extremely popular some years back - and it still works! There's lots of network stuff you can do on simple machines. You'll have fun. :)

PS: For some reason, your messages are double spaced. :)
 
NeuralNet said:
But more interestingly (and I was going to ask this at some point) I watched
a youtube video on someone who connected a 5100 to the internet
setting up a laptop as a PPP and connecting it to the 5100 with a rs232 to
usb adapter. I saw him make it to the google homepage.
Click to expand...
Are you sure it was a 5100?
It's not a problem to connect a 5150 to the Internet (well, unless it's some early unupgraded box with eg. 64 KB RAM).
But 5100 and 5150 are _completely_ different machines!
 
Unless it's been modified and a hard drive added, the 5150 will have only floppy drives so technically no version of DOS will be installed on it. It will depend on what software (on floppies) you get with it. Did whomever you bought it from mention any software?
 
I didnt buy it yet. Im gonna go check it out later this week or next week. He knew about the computers but i dont know if he knew the details on that machine. He deals with a lot of vintage computers and as a lot of sale.
 
Well I got an email back from the guy selling the ibm

"Just to let you know the IBM PC is actually an IBM PC XT -- it has a hard drive and a 5 1/4" drive. I think the hard drive is just shy of 4 MB if I remember right. DOS is already installed on the hard drive as well as some various programs. RAM memory is 640K. I do have it set up with a third party color monitor which looks really nice. It is all set to go for you."

I guess I will figure out Dos version soon and what not. I looked up the XT online and it said some have support for 3.5 inch floppy?
 
Don't forget to park the hard drive heads before shipping or moving it! Otherwise the HDD will likely be dead on arrival. The parking software is on the original IBM Guide To Operations setup disk.
 
wikipedia says:

"pcpark

Parks the hard disk heads in order to enable safe shutdown; only used on early versions.

pcpark

No Unix equivalent.

MS-DOS 3.2 (and possibly others) used the command HHSET "


Will this work for me if I had the right dos version?
 
dongfeng said:
Don't forget to park the hard drive heads before shipping or moving it! Otherwise the HDD will likely be dead on arrival. The parking software is on the original IBM Guide To Operations setup disk.
Click to expand...

I hope you don't speak out of experience..
 
Jorg said:
I hope you don't speak out of experience..
Click to expand...

:-( I can because I had an XT shipped to me that worked fine for the previous
owner before he shipped it, when it arrived at my home the HD
(original Seagate ST-412) would no longer boot, and I could not even Low level
format it. It was even shipped in the original IBM XT box, with all foam padding intact.

All the parking utility does is to move the heads to the less critical
tracks at the end of the disc. If these tracks get messed up its not
fatal to the drive. Track 0 is the critical one, if it gets damaged the drive
cannot be formatted at all. Fortunately I was able to 'fix' this drive by
altering the position of the arm which detects the track 0 position,
and moving it out by a few tracks.
 
This IBM Im buying comes in the original box. I have to drive an hour an a half to get it.

I was researching how to park a hard drive and I found this on parking an IBM PC XT in a message board. Has anyone heard of this:

"I used to use a program called SHUTDOWN.EXE back in the good old days of the IBM PC XT (the first model with hard drives) upto the early 386s. By the way, does your machine have a big red switch in the back right corner. SHUTDOWN.EXE would draw a big red switch in text mode and flip it to signify that it had parked the heads."
 
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