Second gen pc - IBM XT

blu3shad0w · 3 Dec 2011 at 01:04

hey

Did any one here ever own or work on An IBM XT. This was the second gen of IBM PC and was released back in March 1983.

It had a massive 128kb of ram and a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive...

The clock speed was an uber fast 4MHZ....

By Dad had one of these old machines. It had a hercules display and I played a game on it called moonbase.

Later I was to see one in work in 1998. Wonder if there still out there in work places and homes...

Blue

agw_01 · 3 Dec 2011 at 01:11

Not an IBM, but I have a fully operational Tandy 1000 upstairs

294156_10150765032890162_776710161_20642306_7517562_n.jpg

8088 CPU, 640k RAM and dual 5 1/4" floppy drives. It also has a 16 colour graphics chip which allowed the original Kings Quest game to look something like this...

293224_10150765033510162_776710161_20642315_1616915_n.jpg

blu3shad0w · 3 Dec 2011 at 01:12

that is so cool...I had an amstrad 286.......Man looks like this thread is going to turn into ancient computers...LOL...

blu3shad0w · 3 Dec 2011 at 01:38

of course if you want to own a bit of computing history...

Check this out LOL...

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/IBM-XT-51..._DesktopPCs&hash=item4ab1519efe#ht_500wt_1156

I know there is a rule about posting from other sites...but I hardly think that overclockers is going to sell ancient computers...

Tealc · 3 Dec 2011 at 10:22

I used an XT and an AT IBM PC back around 1997 at work for a couple of years. One of them has dual 20MB full height hard drives. One of them had a RAM expansion and a CGA card. I also remember a green screen monitor. We used to use their basic word processor and spreadsheet packages.

I sadly don't have any images of them and would imagine they've long since been binned. Besides I no longer work there.

memyselfandi · 3 Dec 2011 at 11:54

My Dad worked for IBM in the 70-90's and had a home machine from them.

It was an IBM XT 286 ... (not a typo) ... physically it looked like an XT system but internally it had a prototype 286 motherboard (later revisions of which made it into the IBM AT). This ran at the blisteringly fast speed of 6MHz and also had a socketed 287 maths co-processor installed. It did have a few carefully soldered wires on the board to get round errors that had been found in the design.

The system was packed full of expansion cards including a EGA graphics card (and monitor). The graphics card was massive, not only being full length itself but also having a full length daughter board giving it a full 256kb of memory. Other cards included ones which were packed with memory. These were just packed with memory slots and one had 16MB installed and the other 8MB ... they were a right pain to configure too as we had no documentation for them and all the settings were done via physical dip switches.

Drive wise ... 20MB full height, 5.25" high density FD and eventually a 3.25" high density floppy (which required a bios patch to get working). Used Stacker on the harddisk to give more space and also tended to have some things arj'ed up and unpacked them onto a ramdisk when we wanted to use them (as as it was a 286 we couldn't use emm386 to make use of the memory).

It was a reasonable machine and did everything it was asked to do. I used it until I went to University in '93 and got a nice new 486DX33