IBM 5150, am I nuts or what?

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Wed Mar 22 10:06:07 2000

On Wed, Mar 22, 2000 at 01:31:51AM -0800, Mike Ford wrote:
> I now have a few IBM 5150 Personal Computers, latching on to the nicest
> ones today along with I think the correct original keyboards. I have to
> wonder if I am not perhaps getting a little dotty in my old age. What the
> heck am I going to do with them?
>
> Anybody else have some? What can they do?

I still have mine from 1983. It doesn't do much any more (occasionally
I fire it up because it has the only copy of something), but with the V20
CPU I put it in way back when, it can run the E11 Demo version and be the
world's slowest PDP-11. And it's perfectly fine for editing and stuff.
About 7 years ago I built a hand-wired multi-I/O card when my Quadboard died
and anyway I was sick of having to use an expansion cab just so I could have
two MFM disks and a floppy drive w/o burning up the 62.5W PSU. That was an
IDE port, SCSI-1, 384 KB of SRAM, 4 COM ports, an FDC, and an EPROM with a
bare-bones IDE BIOS, all on a full length prototype card, and I got a 170
MB IDE disk. I had to upgrade to PC-DOS V3.3 because the PC-DOS V2.0 I'd
been using for ten years couldn't use disk partitions as multiple drives,
and anyway it was FAT12 only so even on my ST-225 the clusters were huge.

Anyway that freed up lots of slots so that the thing fit easily in one box,
even with both an HGC+ and a CGA at once, plus a hardware EMS card and
an NE1000.

> How about a 5100 (sounded like something I might want to hoard if I see one)?

I remember reading an article (in Byte?) about that thing ages ago, it
sounds like a bigger version of HP's HP-85 only with APL instead of BASIC?
Anything that strange has *got* to be worth grabbing!

Speaking of which, has the HP-85 totally disappeared? My dad had one
briefly when I was in high school, I remember using it to cheat on my calc
homework and brought in adding machine tapes with the graphs I didn't feel
like sketching by hand... And there was one in the computer showroom
on the second floor of the Harvard Coop. But I haven't seen one since.
IIRC, the BASIC "PRINT" statement *really* meant print, if you wanted the
display to be on the tiny CRT you had to use something else, "TYPE" maybe?
The way they stuck the BASIC keywords on single keys (like a ZX81, only you
didn't have to use them) was crazy, they were scattered all over the place.
But the combination of a cartridge tape drive, adding machine printer, and
teeny tiny CRT was kind of neat, each part was low-end crap but if you put
them all together it was a pretty usable system.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Wed Mar 22 2000 - 10:06:07 GMT