• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Picked up an IBM 5150. Keeping it original or upgrade ?

V

VintageVic

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 9, 2019
Messages
340
Location
Finland
I could not resist again, but just had to make a bid on local facebook
marketplace. And I ended up being the biggest bidder with 75 euros + pickup from 70 km away.

I'd say a fair price for an IBM 5150, with keyboard, green monitor and even
some floppies and other related material you see here:

1.jpg

There is a minor issue, error 32 301 on the screen, but it is a refreshing change
to receive something that is not completely dead at arrival too :).

2.jpg

Also, both floppy drives seem to read discs - great ! B: drive seems to be a bit
more noisier, perhaps both of them could use a good cleaning and lubrication of the head rails.

I happened to have one text based adventure game on a floppy:
3.jpg

Works nice. Also, booting from IBM pc dos 2.0 has no issues. Floppies include DOS 2.1
as well, though I had not yet time to try that out.

What would you do with this set, if it was yours? How would you upgrade?

I was first thinking about getting a color monitor and hard drive for it, but
now that I have given that a thought; since I have 5160 with 10mb HD and VGA
card, I'm second guessing myself here. I'm might just keep it as it is now!

Somehow, it just is so wonderfully primitive!
 
I would correct the error and keep the original hardware.

Add an XT-IDE if you need more internal storage. Add a network card if you want to get online. Add a memory expansion card if you want more RAM.
Other than that, I'd keep it stock.

That's just my opinion though.
 
When I got my 5150, I installed an XT-IDE with a 32 MB DOM in the only remaining ISA slot and added a 8087. I kept everything that was already there intact. I think that's the best you can do with a 5150. I could install an EGA card (which I have), a multi I/O card for more ports etc., but I don't see the point. Being the very first PC, a 5150 should stay the way it is.
 
You could always cobble together an expansion chassis setup using the open source tx/rx card designs available, if you would to keep it original *and* add features
 
I kept my 5150 stock; MDA display, two (full height) floppies, and 256k ram with the original Model F keyboard.
 
I kept my early run 5150 stock (and in fact had to undo aftermarket installation of a MFM drive), my XT gets kitted out. Provides some additional contrast between the two beyond the former having MDA and the latter having CGA. Still need to get properly working Tandon TM-100s, though. I have bizarrely bad luck with those drives.
 
Are the Magnetic Peripherals, Inc. IBM branded full height drives any better?
 
Chuck(G) said:
"I have bizarrely bad luck with those drives. "

I don't find that surprising. Tandon floppies were known for their low cost.
Click to expand...

I now have 2 TM-848E 8" drives that both work great. One of them needed a new t0 sensor and alignment, but otherwise both are rock solid. Use them fairly regularly.

Could be I just got lucky like you did with your qume 8", or the tandon 8" drives are significantly nicer than their 5"
 
My opinion, but it's up to you...

If it's your only early PC, and you want to play lots of old DOS games, then yeah pimp it out.
But if you have other machines that are better for playing games, then keep it as an original IBM PC experience - low RAM, DOS 2.1, floppy only - that in itself can be fun.
 
SpidersWeb said:
My opinion, but it's up to you...

If it's your only early PC, and you want to play lots of old DOS games, then yeah pimp it out.
But if you have other machines that are better for playing games, then keep it as an original IBM PC experience - low RAM, DOS 2.1, floppy only - that in itself can be fun.
Click to expand...

A few months back I got a copy of Compaq MS-DOS 2.11. I may load that onto my Portable Plus, which has MS-DOS 5.0 on its 10Mb drive.
 
Thanks everyone for your comments.
It confirms me, that keeping it original is the way to go.

The error I have is for letter M being stuck. It does not appear to be, but perhaps
there is something inside the keyboard that I cannot see without opening it up.
I will look into that at some time.

I've been searching for some text based games from abandonware site as the green
monitor doesn't support graphics (or so I believe). That is very limiting, but I must
have some games with it. There are some arcade games even with this limitation that
I've found, but have yet to test out.

Not sure how much ram I have, since there is no POST ram check visible. I might open the
chassis to see inside what's going on in there.

But yeah, since I have the 5160 with VGA/10mb HD, I'm probably going to keep this just as it
is now. No any upgrades. I have means to put media to 360kb floppies; alghough transferring media
from internet to 360kb floppies takes a few steps, when the media is there, the user experience
will be the same what users in the 80's experienced. I'm not going to even get the XTIDE just
for that reason that fiddling with the floppies is part of the fun itself.
 
Okay,

so I opened the case up:

5.jpg
6.jpg

And it seems to be really, really basic :). Just floppy controller and MDA card.
I see, that BANK3 is not populated and therefore the unit probably has 3x64kb = 192kb of RAM.

Now I have to take back something; I think I could at the very minimum extend the ram a bit here.
I have already at my stock fair amount of 4164 chips (for repairing C64's) and I think they should
work in the bank3 giving me at least 256kb of RAM. Even that seems pretty pathetic, but it would
be improvement :).

4.jpg

And the unit has date stamp: 19th september 1984. Pretty late for 5150, huh?
Well, Finland was not leading the computer revolution in the eighties anyway.

It would be interesting to know about the history of this unit. Based on the writings
on some floppies, I believe that the unit was owned by small garden business in Kuopio city.
Or perhaps the unit was owned by the city itself. In any case, since I picked it up from Kuopio,
it must have spent last 35 years in the neighbourhood there.
 
VintageVic said:
I've been searching for some text based games from abandonware site as the green
monitor doesn't support graphics (or so I believe). That is very limiting, but I must
have some games with it. There are some arcade games even with this limitation that
I've found, but have yet to test out.
Click to expand...

Maybe not one of the best places to start, but certainly not one of the worst.

http://www.vintage-basic.net/games.html
 
Out of interest - what inputs does the Philips CM80 you're running this with have? I always thought these were just composite monitors, yet you appear to be running this directly from an MDA card?

I think whether or not to pimp it out really depends on the breadth of your collection. When I first got my 5150, I also anticipated getting a 5160 and 5170 in short order, with the idea they'd all be equipped to various different levels and of course the 5150 would be floppy only with an MDA card and a 5151 monitor with better configurations on the other two machines.

I quickly concluded that the even the opportunity to get hold of a 5160/70 at all (let alone considering the prices they were fetching) meant this was an unlikely goal and I'd be better off pimping out the 5150 as my only oldschool IBM. So although I do own a 5151 monitor and also MDA, Hercules and CGA cards, it is instead normally run with a 5154 and an EGA card fitted. I've never quite got it to 640KB RAM (have a multifunction card to get it to 512KB) but I will do in a heartbeat if I see a Lo-tech or an AST 6 pack plus at a reasonable price. I did also get an XT-IDE (although went for attaching a low capacity 3.5" hard disk to it rather than a CF solution so I do still have a real hard drive even if it's not period correct). It also sports things like an Inport bus mouse which would have be a very uncommon addition.

My general rule of thumb is that I won't pimp it out to an extent that it is impossibly beyond what was achievable at the time (even if unlikely), but I certainly won't be constrained to running it with 256KB of RAM and MDA either. Also worth remembering that when a 5150 was bought for business use (as most were) it would have represented a substantial investment and also likely would have been acquired for a specific purpose which it could still do just as well even when several years old and better hardware having come along. Thus people did in the real world do upgrades on them to keep them running and useful into the early 90's even though every new PC on the market by then was orders of magnitude better. It wasn't really until the rise of Windows 3.1 making a 4MB 386 with VGA the practical base level that the end of the road was truly reached for machines of this class.
 
cwathen said:
Out of interest - what inputs does the Philips CM80 you're running this with have? I always thought these were just composite monitors, yet you appear to be running this directly from an MDA card?
Click to expand...

Yes, it's a MDA with D9 connector to the Philips CM80.

This is one thing I have been considering to upgrade, the MDA. As I have hercules adapter, pulled
from 5160 (replaced it with a vga card), I could use the hercules with the 5150.

I've been worried to put it there though, as I've read comments that wrong type of display
adapters *may* damage your monitor. I've been meaning to ask here if anyone knows that
is the philips CM80 compatible with Hercules display adaptor? Connector fits of course, but do I dare
to try it out here?

I've tried chkdsk and confirmed that I indeed seem to have 256kb of ram so my upgrade was successful!
I'm keeping the green monitor, but I'd like to upgrade to Hercules if I was sure it causes no damage to the monitor.
It would give at least some graphics capability to the machine, increasing the number of usable software quite a bit.
Or that's what I suppose.

I'm keeping it floppy pc only. I like to boot it from floppy, it has very nostalgic feel to it. I've been entertaining
the idea that I could replace one of the full height floppies with a half height floppy and put a 720k floppy on top of
it on the other side. If I happen to come across suitable 360k floppy.

1.2mb HD floppy drive will not work - but could it work as 360k floppy on the original 5150 floppy adapter?
Since 1.44 floppy can be used as 720k floppy via the floppy adapter external port. I do have extra 1.2mb floppy
drives at my stock.

I've noticed that 360k floppies that I write with (slightly more modern pc) 1.2Mb floppy drive do not work
reliable in a 360k floppy drive. That appears to be common knowledge but it was new to me. Thus it made
me wonder if using 1.2Mb floppy drive was possible as 360k mode with 5150. Perhaps reaching a bit here,
but the idea is to write floppies with 1.2drive and read them again with 1.2mb in the ibm 5150 would make
the floppy discs work better. I could then also use HD floppies formatted in 360k of course.

Heh, another issue I came across when trying out character based games was that some of them
"required dos 2.1 or newer". My boot disc was dos 2.0. But this is no problem, since I have the 5160,
I can easily make bootable floppy with dos 3.3 from that machine.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top