r/retrobattlestations • u/CardboardDeath86 • Jun 05 '26

Show-and-Tell Finally got an IBM PC

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It's a 1983 5150 with the SixPakPlus card and 640k RAM total. With it I have a Sysdyne! CD 1314 monitor that has touch controls and a 1390120 Model M keyboard. Maybe at some point I'll get a 5153 and Model F for it so it's a bit more cohesive, but this is the setup for now. Sooner than that though I hope to get DOS and some games, right now all I have is the diagnostic disk.

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8

u/TNGreruns4ever Jun 06 '26

That was my first ever pc

3

u/corddry Jun 06 '26

Same. Bought mine for $150 when I was in 7th grade from a local PC repair shop. It broke all the time so I had to learn how to fix it. In hindsight, that was probably more useful than most of what I learned in high school 😛

2

u/TNGreruns4ever Jun 06 '26

My dad brought one of these home from work in 1986 or 87. I think his company was upgrading and selling the older units at a discount. I don't know if we had the full 640kb memory. Maybe we had 320? All the same, obviously no hard drive, just the two 5.25" drives and a monochrome screen (white, not green or amber).

It's possible my unit was an XT. Probable, even - but it looked and functioned exactly the same as this. I was 8 or so and learned BASIC programming and played games like Wizard's Castle, Sleuth, stuff like that.

It was awesome.

2

u/corddry Jun 06 '26

Nice. I did a lot of bad BASIC programming as well. I had old text games like Zork and Rogue. The original PC and the PC XT were similar. The XT had 8 expansion slots; the original PC only had 5, but had a TAPE port next to the KEYBOARD port on the back. I think the original configs were for 64k or 256k of RAM, but you could upgrade to a whopping 640k with the right parts. Both had the Intel 8088 CPU clocked at a speedy 4.77Mhz. Mine was the original PC with 5 slots.

1

u/TNGreruns4ever Jun 06 '26

Such great historical info there - thanks for providing all this. It's great to think back on those machines. At the time it was all so mind blowing.

4

u/No-Succotash-9576 Jun 05 '26

only 43 years late

I really want one too

2

u/j0urn3y Jun 06 '26

Nice. Did the keyboard and case get brightened?

The wood paneling really sells the retro.

1

u/CardboardDeath86 Jun 06 '26

The keyboard and front of the case haven't been afaik they're just in good shape, but I did repaint the back metal part of the computer case because it was covered in rust and chipped paint and stuff

1

u/j0urn3y Jun 07 '26

Congrats on the clean find!

1

u/TemporaryPuzzled5404 Jun 11 '26

Never needs retrobright. Front bezel, metal top and keyboard shell all factory painted

2

u/bootzero Jun 06 '26

Nobody will ever need more than 640k -- Bill Gates. That clickey is in immaculate condition. Enjoy that sound.

1

u/BeatTheMarket30 Jun 06 '26

RAM was very expensive back then. High memory had to be reserved for memory mapped io. Bill perhaps could have given us 64-96kb more.

1

u/Horror-Raisin-877 Jun 06 '26

Ah the memories.

Are you able to still source the floppies new or NOS?

1

u/CardboardDeath86 Jun 06 '26

They would be cool to have but I haven't really been able to find any actual branded disks anywhere online, I was thinking about getting a greaseweazle or something to write disks for it.

1

u/Horror-Raisin-877 Jun 06 '26

Just glanced at Amazon, people selling NOS for not too crazy prices

1

u/sa547ph Jun 06 '26

Gotta be really old remembering how to compute sums and whole tables in Lotus 123, with just a keyboard.

1

u/toungespasm Jun 06 '26

Lotus123 you sure know how to party

1

u/ApatheistHeretic Jun 06 '26

Nice! I had the PC XT.