New IBM AT (5170) setup part 1

I am the original owner of a PC that is older than me.

[bbishoppcm]

Great find! Reminds me of the PS/2 Model 80 I scored a few years back!

[ddewaele]

Totally get the responsible thing to do part :) great buy. this new old stock thing is pretty cool but too expensive with additional shipping and import taxes for me in Europe. They are very difficult to find here. Ended up finding and buying a working 5162 couple of weeks ago and really enjoy the process of getting it up and running again. Lots of history...

[douro]

The shield covers the crystal oscillator and adjustment pot for the 14.318kHz colour clock which is used by the original IBM CGA card.

The ST-4038 was Seagate's first voice coil hard disk. It uses a massive linear actuator sitting on ball bearing linear slides- a real work of technical art. The mass of this linear actuator is actually a bottleneck; Seagate's second-generation drives with their special low-impedance steppers actually had faster seek time due to this.

[DxDeksor]

Cool machine !

I've got an XT from the same year (1988) which wasn't in a really good shape when I got it : the caps of the hdd were shorted, the caps of the psu made the computer unstable, the io/rtc card had a leaky battery ...when I unplugged the two shorted caps (that made the computer unable to start) a third one exploded ! I replaced all of them, but the hdd was rarely starting up. Most of the time it was seeking and then it stopped. But sometimes it kept going and it was reading correctly, so I decided to run it for a couple of hours and hopefully it came back to life. Next I repaired the PSU with fresh caps and now I'm trying to repair the rtc card (the leakage is terrible on it, but being a 2 sided board only with no internal traces, this should be functionnal after some work) and the floppy drive doesn't work at the moment. When i got it, it was scratching my floppy, so it destroyed one of my 5"1/4 floppy :( I tried to clean it but unfortunately it didn't help munch. I guess I'd need an oscilloscope to calibrate it

For now it works fine with a 16 bit io card and a vga card.

I decided to install MS-DOS 4.01 because nobody seems to pay attention to it while it's the DOS that matches the best the date of manufacture of my machine (this is definitely a late 8088 machine !) and for now I didn't have big issues using it. It just looks like dos 3.3 with some dos 5 programs to me (though I never really used both of these XD) but I think it's a bit more advanced than a dos 3.3

[Mrpd]

The reason why your lil' BASIC program didn't go into a loop is because you forgot the GOTO xx (where XX is the line that counts Y+5)
Insert that line and you got a loop :3

[SeltsamerAttraktor]

I really don't get why IBM for so incredibly long decided to stick that utterly useless BASIC into the rom that doesn't even come with disk routines and can only access tape drives (the only IBM PC to have that was the original one, not even the XT had it anymore), while putting the actual setup program onto a floppy disk.

With the PS/2 line I can sort of understand the decision since it needed those darn .adf files for configuring the addon cards, but the AT? C'mon.