Oops... I bought another IBM 5150 for $60!

Overview

Yeah, yeah, yeah… oops, I did it again! I bought yet another IBM 5150 from Craigslist for $60. This rusty but charming Frankenstein PC has a Computer Craft magazine sticker that brought back childhood memories. I take you through the teardown, show you the Western Digital MFM controller and 1985 video card, and write a simple BASIC program. Because why have one IBM 5150 when you can have four?

Key Moments

• 0:00 Introduction: Another $60 IBM 5150!
• 1:30 Tour of my IBM 5150 collection (four and counting)
• 3:00 Exterior overview and that nostalgic Computer Craft sticker
• 5:00 Opening the case and internal inspection
• 7:00 Western Digital MFM controller identification
• 9:00 1985 video card with discrete logic
• 11:00 First power-up attempt (doesn’t work initially)
• 12:30 Second boot: success! Beeps and blinking cursor
• 14:00 Writing “Hello World” in BASIC 1.10 from 1981
• 15:00 Plans for teaching kids BASIC programming

Full Transcript (Edited)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah… Oops, I think I did it again!

Okay, so I just got this IBM 5150 from somebody on Craigslist for sixty dollars. I bought it yesterday. The person told me it works. It’s kind of like a Frankenstein of sorts. He gave me this additional floppy disk drive that he says just needs to have some heads cleaned or something.

So I just thought I’d give you a quick overview. I’ve kind of—I started the video saying I did it again because I have so many of these IBM 5150s. I started, I think, two years ago collecting them, and I think I’m at least up to four. I would have had five, but I screwed up. In May, I went on a road trip to New York and I bought a mint condition 5150, and I tried to ship it before I knew what I was doing, and it got destroyed in shipment. But I learned my lesson—don’t expect FedEx or UPS to deliver a 65-pound box correctly.

But anyway, before I show you this one, let me show you what the other ones I have really quickly.

Okay, so here I’m in my garage, and these are my mint condition or near mint condition. I have one that is really, really mint, and one that has like a scratch on it. These are 5150s as well. So you can see here, that’s one, and then the other one over here. Let me just go take a look. And of course I put them really high so that when they fall they break into pieces. But yeah, the other one isn’t mint. And I have one more. Let me show you.

Down here, that one right there. I think that’s either a 5160 or a 5150, but that one is in really bad condition. I bought it off a guy that had it in a scrap yard truck, and I bought it alongside another PC, which is one of those luggables, which is underneath that monitor. That one I’m gonna do some kind of like wild paint job or something on it because the case is really rusty.

So yeah, let’s go back to the one over there.

Okay, so like I said, I paid sixty dollars for this one, so I couldn’t say no, even though it’s obviously very, very rusty. But you know, this is just patina, and it can—I don’t know, maybe I’ll even leave it like that, who knows.

But let me show you first this floppy drive. I think this is a—it is a—let me see here, it is a Chinon FZ502, which is a—I’m not sure what it is yet. You see here? And yeah, let me quickly see what that is.

Yeah, I looked it up. It’s a Chinon high-density—well, it’s a 360K floppy drive, five and a quarter. And what I was reading on Vogons was that this particular unit kind of likes high-density discs more than anything else. So maybe that’s why the guy was having trouble reading discs, because it’s kind of selective in what it likes to read.

Anyway, I don’t have a faceplate for this. I don’t even know if I need one or not. Well, it’s different than the one down there, so I don’t know. I’ll keep it around. Maybe I’ll make it into like a bench floppy disk if it works.

All right, so let’s take a look a little bit closer at the computer itself.

All right, so one thing that I really liked was this Computer Craft sticker here. I have an entire collection of these magazines, and so I said, “Oh, I gotta have this computer because I love these magazines.” Let me show you what I mean.

So when I was growing up, my father had a subscription to these magazines, and I think I lost them all. But I was lucky enough to find somebody selling the entire collection online. As you can see here, these are from the early ’90s, and Computer Craft goes back a long time. But the logos look very similar, so that has to be the same. It has to be the same logo, even though there’s an overlapping R here. So having that right there kind of brought back my memories of going through these magazines, and I loved it when the magazines gave you like sample code like this and explained a lot of different things.

Well, now I’m kind of deviating, but maybe I’ll do another video on these magazines because I really love them.

All right, back to the computer.

All right, so like I said, I love that this can probably be redone except it’s, you know, kind of patina. But if I plan to use this computer—so these are the floppy drives. I’m not sure if both are in there. This one feels a little bit more substantial than that one. That one feels like it’s empty almost.

Yeah, and in the back, what do I have in the back? Let me see here. Yeah, so let me see. I have another 5150 badge. I was told this had the 135-watt power supply, so we’ll take a look at that inside. We have a keyboard port, a cassette port—I don’t know what that does. I’m assuming it’s a cassette, but I’ve never seen that before. And here we have like a video card with CGA and a parallel port, so a multi-function card of sorts. I don’t know what that is—this could be a RAM card maybe. And apparently this used to belong to LMB Leasing from Dallas, Texas.

All right, so let me open it up so we can take a look at what’s going on inside.

Okay, so we’re inside. It was really straightforward—it was just one screw holding the case back there. As you can see here, it comes off, and I just slid it off like that.

Anyway, let’s go take a look. Yeah, so I knew that felt kind of weird—there’s nothing in there. It’s just a shell, interesting. But this drive is in there. That’s interesting.

And let’s see what’s going on here. Okay, so we have the speaker. This is the 135-watt power supply, which the guy told me is a higher-end unit than this normally came with. So that’s good.

And by the way, I haven’t even powered this up yet, so I’m not sure if it works. I’m gonna take the person’s word for it. And then maybe at the end of this video, I’ll power it up really quickly with one of my monitors.

All right, so going back to the cards, this is—what is this? Let me take it off. It’s kind of loose in there. Looks like some kind of—what is this? Let me take a look. It’s a Western Digital Corporation. Looks like a multi-I/O or floppy disk controller or IDE controller. Can be IDE or MFM. Oh, this is an MFM controller! Let me just quickly verify that.

Yep, this is a Western Digital WDXT-GEN2 Plus 8-bit ISA MFM controller. So this guy right here—cool!

So let’s go back to the PC again.

Okay, so this is obviously a floppy disk controller, which is connected here to the floppy drive. And we have the gigantic video card here. Let me take it out and see what that’s all about.

All right, here we go. This is the video card. I love these cards that have a lot of discrete logic on them. They just bring you back to a time when computers were really primitive. Apparently this is from 1985, and it’s a black and white and parallel. So black and white monochrome output with parallel port.

So yeah, it’s kind of amazing. It’s a 6845 there, and an I/O up device. And it doesn’t say much in terms of model number or anything, because back then you just had to look up—you either knew what you were looking at, or you had to go by the chips and kind of deduce what functionality was built into this.

This is some kind of—the numbers are coming off of that. That might be a ROM chip, could be, or something else. This blue chip—what is that? 16-2-4. I wonder if that’s like a PAL or something. I don’t know.

But yeah, a lot of chips there. I wonder if this is all discrete or if there’s a ROM here that has to be duplicated. If it’s discrete, I would love to make something like this in an FPGA or something and swap it up as an experiment.

So yeah, let me put everything back together and see if I can get it to boot up before I wrap up this video.

Actually, before I do that, I realized I neglected to show you the star of the show, which is the motherboard. As you can see here, there is some RAM here and some ROM chips over here for the BIOS. Over here we have some I/O devices, some I/O ports, some chips to manage the BIOS, some DIP switches, which I’m not going to touch because I’d probably never get it right again. And what else? The CPU must be down there somewhere, so I can’t get to it. Maybe I’ll give you like a virtual show. Can you see it in there? Probably not.

Anyway, that’s it for the motherboard. Let me do what I said I was gonna do and power it up.

Okay, here we go. I plugged in my CRT monitor here. Let me see, do I do it? And we’re back. This is the second moment of truth, because the first one didn’t work. I just turned it off and turned it back on, and now we get beeps and I get a cursor up there. It’s a blinking cursor, and we wait because this is a 4.77 megahertz computer, and it tries to load DOS from floppy, but there’s nothing in there. So eventually it loads BASIC.

I love it! So it’s from version 1.10 from 1981.

So if I go to—if I type in some code here—10, print, do I have to use quotes or not? Let me say “Hello World.” And if I go, if I type in RUN, does it run it? I don’t know what it’s doing. What if I just type in PRINT “Hello”? Oh, so I do have to use quotes!

I don’t know, it’s been 20 years or more since I’ve done BASIC. So if I type in 10 PRINT—oh, come on, sorry, I’m looking at the screen and typing with my right hand—PRINT “Hello World.” And then press Enter, and then type in RUN. It ran! Okay, so the computer computes. That’s cool!

I’m gonna use this to teach my kids how to say “Hello World” in BASIC, the very least I could do. And yeah, I kind of like it. I love that. I love that.

So yeah, if you like this kind of stuff, check out my other videos. I have a bunch of other things with Packard Bells and other—and I’m gonna have other laptops, vintage stuff, 286s, thin clients, a bunch of other stuff. Some of the videos are done more professionally, some are very, very ad hoc like this.

But yeah, let me know what you think. If you’d like to see something running on this computer or any of these, maybe I can stack up all of my—maybe I’ll have a 5150 wall right here. What do you guys think? Like one, two, three, four. It’s like the wall of 5150s. Maybe that’ll be my next video. And network them! Oh, that’d be kind of cool, right?

All right, maybe I’ll do that. Until next time, guys. Bye!