Stefan Mileschin

Someone might need an upgrade

The classic IBM PC Model 5150 is now officially 40 years old.

For those not born at the time, IBM was famously late to the game when the Model 5150 put in an appearance. It should have had its clock cleaned by the likes of Commodore, Amiga and even Apple, but Big Blue decided to target businesses who were starting to think that Apple gear looked pretty neat, particularly if the catching on fire feature was not available.

IBM did something unheard of in its history, it decided to be agile and use off-the-shelf hardware and software and adopt an open architecture.

Intel's 8088 was selected over the competition (including IBM's own RISC processor) and famously, Microsoft was tapped to provide PC DOS as well as BASIC that was included in the ROM.

The basic price for the 5150 was $1,565, with a fully loaded system rising to more than $3,000. Users could enjoy high resolution monochrome text via the MDA card or some low-resolution graphics (and vaguely nauseating colours) through a CGA card, which could be installed simultaneously. RAM landed in 16 or 64kB and could be upgraded to a huge 256kB while the Intel 8088 CPU was a blistering 4.77 MHz.

It had two 5.25" floppy disks and could even attach a cassette recorder - remember them?. There was no hard disk, and adding one presented a problem for users with deep enough pockets: the motherboard and software didn't support it and the power supply was about as reliable as a mountain village in Bulgaria.

The motherboard also included slots for expansion, which eventually became known as the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus as the IBM PC clone sector exploded. IBM's approach resulted in an immense market for expansion cards and third party software. It eventually kicked Apple out of the market and resulted in the firing of Steve Jobs which in normal circumstances would have saved the world.

The Model 5150 was eventually discontinued in 1987.

https://fudzilla.com/news/53379-ibm-pc-model-5150-is-40