On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, Megan wrote:
> >I saw an IBM 5150 today in a thrift store. The odd thing about it was
> >that it had no disk drives! It only had two black covers over the disk
> >drive bays. It seems like it came from the factory this way. It is the
> >first revision of motherboard with the cassette jack, so its conceivable
> >that it was used with a cassette recorder and was always like this. Does
> >anyone wish to concur on this? I'm debating if I should get it, but not
> >for the $20 they have it tagged for.
>
> Interesting... I had a machine in one of the piles at work (I have a
> second office, called the 'Annex' where I do hardware hacking for my
> group on occasion, and stuff gets dumped there) which I recently
> excessed, and it had 'IBM-PC' on it, along with 5150 on one of the
> labels... But it had a fair amount of memory in it, and a hard disk
> drive in it... Should I have saved it and tried to purchase it from
> the company?
That machine would have the IBM BIOS upgrade in it--IIRC, the upgrade allowed
640K RAM and XT 10 or 20 MB disks (I once knew a guy who had tubes and tubes of
the originals back when they were worth something--probably a multi-millionaire
by now). It probably also has an upgraded PS as (again, IIRC) the original was
only 63 watts--not enough if the slots were maxed out and a hard disk was added
to the mix. Wow, what a power-user box that would have been in its day.
--
David Wollmann
DST / DST Data Conversion
http://www.ibmhelp.com/
Received on Sun Mar 14 1999 - 16:23:20 GMT