IBM Woes: The Fun and Frustration of Owning the Original PC

It’s 3am. I’m hunched over a rusty metal chassis covered in microchips. I just stripped another screw. How the hell did I get here?

Out of all the things to crop up on eBay, three IBM XTs is unusual to say the least. Here in the UK just finding one of these computers is rare, so I did rub my eyes in disbelief when three showed up at once. What’s that old saying about buses?

For those of you who don’t know the IBM PC is considered to be the grandfather of the modern computer. Invented in 1981, it was the first computer to use the x86 architecture now found in almost all modern computers we use today. The impact it left on the tech industry can not be understated but here in the UK it didn’t cause as much of a splash as it did in its home country of the United States. In the Early 80s the UK was experiencing the microcomputer boom and companies like Sinclair, Commodore, and Acorn were king over here. Therefore for someone who likes collecting vintage computers this was a must.

After a nail biting auction (and some last minute sniping) I bagged myself and IBM XT, the later and slightly improved mk2 version of the PC. Unfortunately things weren’t as good as the pictures made it seem. The case was rusty, the paint was flaking off, the motherboard was dirty, the hard drive was making a scary grinding noise, and the floppy drive wouldn’t read a disk. This was going to be a long night...

Step one was to open the computer up and see what I had to work with. The date code on the motherboard and a quick check on the “Minus Zero Degrees” IBM PC reference site told me that my machine was built in 1986, a later model with some slight tweaks and bios upgrades. I used compressed air to blow out all the dust and crud from the motherboard.

I very quickly decided that the 20MB hard disk drive the computer was fitted with was junk. It was the size of a house brick, weighed a metric ton, and was making some truly scary noises. All of the files on it were corrupted and wouldn’t open anyway so out it came. While I was sad I couldn’t find anything cool on the drive (the seller told me the previous owner was an electrical engineer) its new life as a paper weight is more useful to me.

Luckily the IBM XT harks from the days where a hard drive was optional and I soon discovered that the computer can be booted directly from floppy! That would be great if the floppy drive actually read the disks I inserted into it. After stripping several 35 year old screws and much swearing the floppy drive came out and I could now start using isopropyl alcohol to clean the heads.

While having a working floppy drive was nice, I wouldn’t actually end up needing it. After a couple of days of working on the computer a friend told me about something called an “XT 2 IDE” device. This is a custom PCB expansion card you can plug into one of the XTs expansion slots and use a compact flash card as a hard drive. This would make moving data on and off the machine much easier! Two weeks later the device was installed into the machine, complete with an installation of PC-DOS 3.20.

The last job I needed to do was to sort out the cosmetics of the computer. That rusty case had to be sorted out. After removing the plastic face-plate I used paint stripper to take the metal case back down to bare steel. It pained me to remove all that original paint, but it was for the best. With the paint gone I could sand away the rust (while trying hard to keep the original texture of the case) and spray it with some grey spray paint. The colour wasn’t an exact match but I was very happy with the results!

Now that the computer was done, I could finally sit down and enjoy some classic early 80s gaming. My particular IBM XT was fitted with a CGA card which gives some pretty ugly 4 colour graphics. While I do plan on swapping it out for a monochrome MDA card it was enough to enjoy “California Games” and “Test Drive 2: The Duel”. The game I had most fun with was David Murray’s “Planet X3” which was designed to run on the slowest of slow computers, a perfect fit for 4.77 MHz of pure speed!

While restoring the IBM was an absolute slog, I’m very glad I did it. It now takes pride of place in my vintage computer collection and I know that when I get that itch to work on something really ancient, there’s always another upgrade or tweak I can do to it. Do I recommend the IBM PC to beginners just starting off in the retro computing hobby? The short answer is no. While common in the States, they’re rare here in the UK and tend to go for silly money when they do show up. That being said, if you stumble across one like I did it’s well worth picking up, there’s a lot of fun (and frustration) to be had!