Uncreative Labs

Joined: 23 Jun 2005 Posts: 5 Location: Garden Grove, CA

Last week I got a sweet deal through eBay. Some guy moving his office down by Irvine (CA) had an old IBM PC that had been there as long as anyone could remember. He just wanted to get rid of it and would not ship, so I got it for $150! It's a 5150A with DOS 1.0 and 2.0, Visicalc 1.00 and some business software, all in perfect condition. The power supply is dead but that is easy enough to fix. The serial number is just over 100000, so it was one of the first ones off of the assembly line. Somebody paid a lot of money back in 1981 and barely used the thing. It also has a 5151 monitor and keyboard, and the control card for a Corvus external hard drive. I didn't ask about the hard drive and they probably wouldn't part with it anyway since it is an insurance company and it could have had sensitive information on it, even if it was 30 years old.

Joined: 21 Dec 2005 Posts: 66

I think the power supply can be fixed or found. The original is only 63 watts and it is grossly undersized. If you open it you might be able to find the fault and repair it.

The 5151 is also classic - take good care of it.

If you are interested in a hard drive for the machine look at the XT-IDE project. It's an 8 bit card that lets you run a fairly recent IDE hard drive on the PC or XT. The problem with the old MFM hard drives is that they are all 20 to 30 years old now, and they were only designed for 5 years at best. So even if you had received it, it might not be usable. (It would have made a great artifact though ... an external Corvus hard drive for a PC is rare.)

Mike

Joined: 23 Jun 2005 Posts: 5 Location: Garden Grove, CA

I have a spare PS, and I've rebuilt machines like this before. I just haven't gotten around to replacing it and testing it yet. I don't think I'll add a hard drive to this one unless it's external. I want to keep this one as close to original as possible.