SDF @sdforg.bsky.social · Apr 12 monochrome, no graphics, no serial port, no hard drive and DOS 1.00 - accept it and fight the urge to upgrade it, this is the original IBM PC. icm.museum #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing
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At the time, I had purchased the 1st Univac PC which was the same: two 5.25 floppies, no hard drive, no graphics, 9pin dot matrix printer & a dip switch to choose from 6Mhz to 8Mhrz
I had this, more than one. All in the bin. E-waste because of the cga, ega and then that magical 286, 386, 486(dx no less!) I look around at the tech now and can't see anything that will be collected like this but I bet there is and we can't see it yet. Wish I'd kept them 😕
There is one of these that still works?
Mouse?!? Where?!? Kill it! Kill it!
This was my first work computer. I remember most the constant floppy swapping.
And if you wanted to add a monitor you had to open it up and flip the right switches on the motherboard, and it cost $3,000
And 5" floppies!
Don't forget ROM BASIC!
Yep my office had those. That and 5 1/2 floppies
Go on... stick some Hercules graphics in there, and a RAM expansion card.
I wrote an entire accounting system to run on these. Programs on the a: drive, data in the b: all the data in ascii files.
Been there, done that - my first IBM-PC XT cost $10k & had 640 k RAM & a 10 meg Winchester drive.
Yeah, I Had A Few A Dem
You are making me feel old. Lol.
$4000 out the door, unless you wanted the options.
I remember when these were released. Switched from an IMSAI to IBM PC. Was also doing COBOL on a Honeywell mainframe running CP6, which originated at Xerox.
serial wasnt a standard? interesting
And to think you could've had a Commodore 64 with graphics. And games! So many games!
I had one. I got extra memory and gad to open her up, stick in the memory and reset some flip switches to get the memory recognised.
The first one I built had 512K, a 360K floppy drive and a Seagate 20MB hdd with an 80mS access time and ran DOS. Had a RS232 port so I connected a 300 baud modem and ran a FIDO BBS.
Comes with the absolute worst audio capabilities of any computer ever (not counting those that have none).
I thought the COM port was serial. RS-232 definattly was
some of us have to change a setting to get that sweet sweet monochrome feel in our modern terminal windows....
My first PC had about the same specs, but I started with DOS 3.2 ... back in 1985 ... hard disks and graphics cards were out of reach at the time.
what do you mean "no graphics"?
I miss my Victor 9000 🥺
No. Just the opposite. Gut it. Gut it out whole. Replace the innards with modern Windows 10 compatible hardware, for the cheap, and avoid all that CoPilot crap. Get flat screen 24" FHD monitor. Replace a floppy drive with dual dvd drives Fill the rest with SSD storage. And add #ClickyKeyboard! 👍😁
So it runs/boots off of a floppy disc?
Wordstar. Good times.
Love this! I'd like to rent time on this please!
A major step backward compared to the microcomputers available at the time!
How much RAM? 64K? 128K?
No graphics? Hercules!
This is what I really wanted, but couldn’t afford it. Would run IBM AIX. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC
My first too. Then moved up to an AT (i286) with a hard drive. Big upgrade. Then, used a Mac SE/30. Never looked back.
Memories. Got me my first job.
Had one.
Didn't the very early ones only have a single sided disk drive?
The upgrade.
Yep, I used one. A://
$2800 ??
> the actual PC I used as a teenager > museum