retrocomputing
If you thought IDE hard drives were becoming scarce, just try what I spent the last few hours doing and shop for an ESDI hard drive.
I'm trying to restore a trash-picked (& VG condition) IBM 5160 (the PC XT) that turns out to have been complete except for HDD & keyboard. The rescue included an amber MDA monitor & ESDI controller with cables, though I didn't recognize the controller until today.
Going with an IDE controller & CF or SD adapter is an option, I suppose.
retrocomputing
Also, I learned the hard way that even though the 5150, XT, AT, & pre-PS/2 IBM clones all have physically compatible keyboard sockets (5-pin DIN, just like MIDI sockets), the 5150 & XT use an incompatible protocol, so AT-style keyboards won't work unless they have an XT-mode switch.
Welcome to IBM PC-XT (5160) Cassette Basic in ROM, required for the earliest PC-DOS BasicA even though the cassette port & header pad both ceased to exist after the 5150.
It's amazing what plugging in a compatible keyboard can accomplish. Now I can clean the floppy drive, get boot disks, & weigh HDD options.
BTW, that line after the syntax error message isn't one I typed in again. It printed the line & put the cursor at the beginning so I could edit it.
Also, I miss messy full-screen program editors like that. Press Enter, the line your cursor's on is executed. If the line starts with a number, it's inserted in your program, automatically sorted numerically, replacing the same-numbered line if it already exists.
You'd think that a boxed set of disks still in shrinkwrap would be best protected from damage. Nope. this is the underside of a DOS 3.3 boot disk that sat unused & protected in a tyvek sleeve, in a special pocket, in a 3-ring binder, in a box, under shrinkwrap for 31 years. Look at the mylar disc visible through the oval access hole.
It's hard to tell from the label. The icky label is the Startup (boot) disk, & the good label is the Operating disk. The mylar of the Operating disk is just as damaged. It does explain why it wouldn't boot in my XT.
But the weird thing is both original disks were fine in my 286's 1.2 MB drive the one time I put them in there, & by coincidence the one command I ran to exercise them both was diskcopy, giving me a full duplicate of both disks, & both copies work just fine in my XT.
It's a good thing neither IBM nor Microsoft put copy protection on their DOS boot/install disks.
It also could be where the disks were stored. This set shipped from New Jersey, & nothing indicates it was anything other than new-old stock that spent virtually its entire life there. I got several other boxes from Utah with PC-XT disks in them, & there wasn't any visible damage.
