August 12, 2011, 1:00 PM — 
When IBM released its first personal computer, the 5150, 30 years ago, it was deliberately drab--black, gray, and low-key. That's because IBM intended the 5150 to be a serious machine for people doing serious work.
When IBM released its first personal computer, the 5150, 30 years ago, it was deliberately drab--black, gray, and low-key. That's because IBM intended the 5150 to be a serious machine for people doing serious work.
[7 days without social media and 7 days using only keyboard shortcuts: No mouse, no trackpad, no problem?]
So how better to celebrate this important anniversary than by using the 5150 for what it was meant to do? Working on a 5150 seems to be a tall task in today's vastly accelerated computing world, however. Could a PC that's as old as I am manage to email, surf the Web, produce documents, edit photos, and even tweet?
I sequestered myself for four days amid boxes of 5.25-inch floppy drives and serial cables to find out. The answer to my question turned out to be both yes and no--but more interesting was all the retro-computing magic I had to perform. In the end, my experiment proved two things:
- Despite the vast improvements in computing power over the years, the basic job of a PC isn't fundamentally different today from what it was 30 years ago.
- Early floppy discs were just too darned small!
Day 1: Setting Up
I was interested in spending more time with the Model 5150 because it's the foundation of so much modern computing. For the past 30 years, the platform created by the IBM PC has served as the basis for personal computing innovation and progress. Today, most people use PCs that retain some level of compatibility with a computer system released three decades ago.
When I first set out to test the mettle of the 5150, I realized that this special challenge called for a unique test environment. I couldn't pull this off at my house; I would be too tempted to use modern computers as a crutch. I needed a secret bunker, a distant location where I could wrestle with vintage technology unhindered and uninterrupted. (Did I mention that I have a one-year-old at my house?)
After careful thought, I sequestered myself in an infrequently used room in the upstairs corner of my parents' house. The bulk of Day 1 consisted of moving equipment over. I needed to take not only the PC itself, but also what seemed like 15 metric tons of supporting hardware that I could use for repairs in case the PC broke. Among those supplies were a few dozen ISA expansion cards (including spare video cards, serial cards, and the like), a couple extra 5.25-inch floppy drives, some tools, and a box of assorted cables.
Day 2: Trying to Fix the Thing
Day 2 began with a general survey of the PC. The first thing I did was open the case and assess what was inside. In the PC's five ISA expansion slots, I found a CGA video card, a memory expansion card, a floppy controller card, and a serial card for communicating with mice and other peripherals. For storage, my PC came equipped with a lone, full-height 5.25-inch 360KB DS/DD floppy drive. Thankfully, someone had maxed out the RAM at 640KB (yep, that's a massive 640 kilobytes--roughly 0.032% of the RAM on today's low-end PCs). When I looked for the processor, I found a surprise: One of this system's previous owners had replaced the Intel 8088 CPU with a Zilog V20 CPU.
The V20, originally designed by NEC, was a pin-compatible enhancement of the 8088 that could run certain programs 30% faster than the 8088 could--even though it ran at the same 4.77MHz clock speed. But it wouldn't be historically accurate to run such a speed demon for this challenge, so I replaced the V20 with an 8088 chip that I had in my collection.
