I decided I needed something interesting to decorate my office with. The 5150 is the perfect choice for the discerning engineer.

This is a mid 1984 production IBM PC, the PC that started it all. It originally came with either one or two full height floppy drives, and those look to have been replaced with the half height ones to make room for a hard disk.

The motherboard looks to be in good shape, and it is the 64-256K variety ( 1984 production ). The add on AST SixPackPlus card it typical of the era, giving you extra serial and parallel ports as well as additional memory up to 640K.

The async card (serial) appears to be original IBM 5150 vintage. The display adapter is a Paradise Systems MultiDisplay card which was a nifty adapter back in 1984 as it had both MDA and CGA outputs ( although you could only use one at a time).

I took a close look at the motherboard and it doesn’t appear that the tantalum caps have been changed.. so I’ll do that as the old ones tend to explode.

The power supply is not the original 5150 as that original power supply was only 63 watts, so not enough for a hard drive. This looks to be a Power Tronic 150W power supply used in the XT as well as the PC when upgrading to a hard disk.

The hard drive is a Microscribe 3425, 20MB ST506 interface MFM drive (similar to the classic ST225). 625 KB/sec transfer rate.

I think Clay might have a few of these buried in his lab somewhere.. and perhaps even some memory for it!