Fun With the IBM-5150 PC
My History With Retro Computing
Commodores, Apples, and Nintendos
For as long as I can remember way back into my childhood, I have been fascinated with computers and technology. It all started with the Christmas of 1987 which is when my brother and I got a brand new NES and a color TV. I hooked up the composite video adapter to the television, switched the television to channel 3, and began trying to save the princess.
The fun didn’t stay confined within the gray plastic corners of the NES or the cartridge though. I began to wonder what made the machine work. Rather than allow me to take my NES apart (which I had already done a couple of times before getting caught), my Dad went digging through the closet and uncovered a treasure that I had no idea we owned. It was a nearly mint Commodore 64 that he had purchased very close when they came out and coincidentally the same year I was born, 1982. The computer was likely something he wanted for the games and graphics, yet he wrote off as a farm expense with the idea that he’d manage our assets and expenses with. As things like that usually go, he ended up playing Lazarian a few times, bought a couple of Fisher-Price learning games for kids, and closeted the C=64 for a few years until my brother and I grew a little more.
At the time, our elementary school was phasing out the C=64 and peripherals in favor of Apple II and II-e machines so I was in 8 bit heaven. The school allowed me to take home every disk drive, cartridge, printer, and game that I wanted along with extra machines, cords, and accessory I could get my hands on as long as it was Commodore compatible. Over the next few years my brother and I learned BASIC from magazines that my Dad subscribed to and that we’d recently uncovered in our old storage room after moving into town. That’s when our careers as computer programmers and desktop graphic artists began.
IBM and IBM PC Clones
After a few years went by, my Dad began to enroll in vo-tech courses on computer operating systems and BASIC programming. He’d bring his material home and he eventually started bringing home IBM compatible machines including a Tandy-1000, some Tandy x386 machine, and a pristine IBM 5150 PC. Now of course the 5150 outdates the Commodore 64 by a year, but it was the basic business package with a 20mb HDD, 2 x 5.25" 360kb Disc Drives, and a number of old discs a friend gave him. It was built for the demand of business and very heavy. The 386 was more or less the gaming machine with X-Wing and Tie Fighter on it while the Tandy-1000 was one that I enjoyed using for desktop publishing and making signs and banners for events and fun. I also wrote a little BASIC myself, but left most of that to Michael. This is where we began to really get into more modern computing.
After a while, we were given a homebuilt Pentium 90MHz Windows 95 PC with the internet and that’s when things got really interesting. We pioneered new websites and worked on programming together. Michael even wrote a small turn based game called The Big Giant Head for DOS. It was crude and simple, but fun for us nevertheless. We were self taught BASIC programmers and not afraid to try things all the time.
So What About the 5150?
Well of the three IBM/PC types of computers we had, the IBM-5150 was built like a tank, and although one was full color (The 386), I was instantly drawn to the magic of the IBM 5150 and the industrial look and feel of it. It had a 20mb HDD in it, the 5151 Monochrome Monitor, a Model F buckling springs keyboard with capacitive switch plates, and hundreds of BASF diskettes for us to use. We spent a lot of time in PC-DOS writing stories in .txt files, while also programming and arranging tunes with a very early MIDI like software that I can’t even remember the name of now.
From Concepts
To Playing Youtube Videos Via Telnet
Fast forward to now, and a lot has happened since the childhood and adolescent years of tinkering with computers, but a lot of cool things have come about since then as well.
Our “New” 5150
In 2006 I started the Computer Science career path at Arkansas State University. Having been in school already for 6 years the running joke was that I would never graduate from college so my favorite professor, Dr. Jeff Jenness, and I struck a deal that I would leave our pristine and slightly used IBM 5150-XT in the display and trophy case of the Computer Science and Mathematics building until I graduated. I eventually graduated in 2012, but had sort of forgotten that the 5150 was in the case. It was in the case alongside a pristine Sinclair computer, a giant 50lb HDD platter the size of a milk crate, and a perfect condition C=64 with all accessories. I decided that after moving off to North Carolina in 2013 then moving back to take a very good position in the marketing department of E.C. Barton & Co., it was time to take the 5150 out of hock.
That proved to be a problem. There was a mix-up with who’s property each computer was and the shelf that they had been sitting on for nearly 10 years broke and gave way to gravity. The Dean of the Department of Mathematics requested a cleanup of the area and unfortunately the 5150 was trashed. It was upsetting to say the least.
A few days later Dr. Jenness offered to reimburse me if I ordered one from eBay and I found an awesome 5150 loaded with goodies from TexElec on Youtube. It came with a 256k Tecmar Mate card to boost the memory to 320kb and a Lo-Tek ISA to IDE adapter card that allows it to use a Compact Flash card as the main HDD! In a nutshell it’s a 4.77MHz 8088 machine with the 8087 co-processor, a custom ROM-BIOS, 320kb of RAM, a CGA video card, and 4 whopping gigabytes of HDD space divided into 2x2GB partitions. More details here:
After purchasing the machine I was determined to use it as productively as possible so I began researching online and stumbled upon an article by PC Advisor UK writer, Benj Edwards, entitled “Our intrepid reporter spends a week trying to write, browse the Web, edit photos, and even tweet on IBM’s first PC.”
It really got me thinking. What if I could do that!? So I did and then some.
My first attempts involved trying to connect the 5150 serial port via null modem cable to my raspberry pi for terminal access. I couldnt get it to work.
The Show Must Go On
Although I was unsuccessful with the Raspberry Pi and Rs-232 terminal emulation, I was determined to get this beast of a machine on the internet and connected to my network so I began researching the possibility of using real TCP/IP Ethernet on the old 5150. I was in luck!
Luckily for me and the rest of the DOS and Retro computing community, a hobbyist and C/C++ developer for DOS named Michael Brutman has been maintaining and developing single use programs based on packet drivers for 8bit ISA Ethernet cards.
This was going to require a new card and some rearrangement of devices on my part, but I went ahead and ordered a 3COM 503 Etherlink II TP card for about $40 on eBay and had it shipped to my work. It came in with the static sleeve and plenty of bubble wrap and styrofoam.
I immediately went home and made room for the new card. Since my Floppy drives are mechanically defunct at the moment and since I have a 4gb CF card for storage, I removed the floppy disk controller card and placed the Etherlink II TP card right into the slot. After a little back and forth and head scratching directly with Michael Brutman, I was able to properly configure the jumpers and initiate the packet drivers to get it working. I have since configured the packet drivers and DHCP to run with an autoexec.bat file at boot so it’s like a modern computer and immediately is assigned an IP address so that the rest of Michael Brutman’s wonderful mTCP software suite will work.
My Build Phase Journey via DevRant
Adventures in IBM 5150 Telnet
Since the initial build my brother has been spending a lot more time working with the machine using Telnet to either use my Mac or Raspberry Pi Raspbian when he wants to really play on the internet. I am sharing a few screenshots and links to DevRant.io that we’ve recorded and I hope to cover some of the things he’s done since the initial build in a new post, but for now, here are a few things he’s done.
I hope to follow up with some of the more defined details of what he’s done so far, but here are a few things.
Note: Most of these can be done better or faster via local terminal on Ubuntu or macOS using Lynx Browser, however they are really fun via Telnet on the 5150. Old Telnet directories and sites can be visited directly without terminal emulation and this makes for a really cool experience when using the 5150 on the internet.
Conclusion
This project has been a lot of fun and it has brought the fun, magic, and wonder in computing back to the surface with my brother and me. We have owned lots of old computers over the years and have had a healthy appetite for learning new things and rehashing old concepts. Using the terminal emulation and telnet will give you a whole new appreciation for GUI driven applications and also teach you to be more efficient with the CLI in your day to day workplace computing.
I hope you enjoyed this. If you would like to stay caught up in some of the ideas shared here, please follow our Pinterest board and DevRant accounts to stay up on the details of our next adventure.
