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Desktops and mini PCs

IBM PC

11owners with an opinion
62%of verdicts positive
5/3positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and ease of use; criticized for performance and noise.

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What people wrote

Doesn’t like it
I was horrified by the IBM PC. It was clearly a POS cut-down design being sold at an insanely inflated price, hidden behind an entirely fake base price invented for marketing only. The keyboard was good, but the rest of the spec was insulting, and a clear step back from the state of the art S-100 systems and the Apple II which were already handling colour and (for S-100) networking and limited multitasking. The Amiga came later, and always looked like something from ten years in the future. It genuinely had a mid-90s aesthetic and promise in the late 80s. The PC and Windows were both triumphs of worse-is-better corporate mediocrity and mass marketing over creative engineering. It wasn't until the 486 multimedia clones arrived that prices became more reasonable and the hardware started to look competitive. But DOS and Windows always remained poor-to-mediocre - buggy, unreliable, messy, not secure, bizarrely user hostile - apart from a brief period downwind of NT when Windows was tolerable.
Doesn’t like it
The first time I used an IBM PC I was so disappointed. On every aspect of the interaction my Apple II would run rings about it. Character IO via the BIOS on CGA was glacial to avoid writing to VRAM and getting snow, and an 8088 at 4.77 MHz was not nearly 4.77 times faster than the 6502 at 1 MHz - in fact, it felt slower. It’s not that the 8088 was a horrible CPU - it was a pretty ok one - it’s just that the 6502 was a beast of a CPU.
Neutral
First family PC was a used IBM PC XT, 8088 w/ 640kb ram and a cga card with an amber monochrome monitor attached. I remember getting a 14.4 modem on it, and it would freeze, had to force it to 9600bps. Then managed to wranle a 486sx w/ 4mb ram and an EGA card and display. First decent computer I built was an AMD 5x86 133mhz with the larger cache module and a whopping 64mb ram that I'd traded for some ANSi work. The irony is for some things it ran circles around the Pentiums that friends had, for others it just slogged. Ran OS/2 warp like a beast though. Ever since then, I've mostly maxed out the ram in my systems... I wend from 128gb down to 96GB for my AM5 build though since the most I've ever used is around 75gb, and I wanted to stick to a single pair at a higher speed.
Likes it
The 5150 was just an "IBM PC" not an XT, but still... I think we're talking about the same thing. I still have mine! 4.77 MHz 8088, 8087 math coprocessor, CGA graphics card, 5.25" floppy (360K, double-sided, double-density), 20 MB Seagate hard drive (I believe the motherboard has newer ROM chips to support that), AST SixPakPlus expansion card to bring it up to 640 KB RAM and a Parallel Port, a Serial Port, a Game Port, and a Real Time Clock (so you don't have to type in the date and time every bootup.) At one point I had a Sound Blaster as well, which was nice. The floppy drive and the hard drive each have their own controller cards so there's almost no more room for expansion! The motherboard also has the keyboard and cassette (!!!) port. I get an error code about the cassette port so I doubt it would work but I never had the equipment to try it out anyway.
Neutral
There were a couple interesting points about the market for 8087 chips -- Intel designed the motherboard for the IBM PC, and they included an 8086 slot and a slot for either an 8087 or 8089. IBM didn't populate the slot for the coprocessor chip as it would compete with their mainframes, but Intel went around marketing the chips to research labs. One of them ended up with Stephen Fried who founded Microway in 1981 to create software for the 8087 and sell the chips, and the company is still in business after 44 years of chasing high performance computing. That's how I first got started with computing - a Microway Number Smasher (TM) card in an IBM PC. The 80287 (AKA 287) and 80387 (AKA 387) floating point microprocessors started to pick up some competition from Weitek 1167 and 4167 chips and Inmos Transputer chips, so Intel integrated the FPU into the CPU with the 80486 processor (I question whether this was a monopoly move on Intel's part). This was also the first time that Intel made multiple versions of a CPU - there was a 486DX and a 486SX (colloquially referred to as the "sucks" model at the time) which disabled the FPU. The 486 was also interesting because it was the first Intel x86 series chip to be able to operate at a multiple of the base frequency with the release of the DX2, DX3, and DX4 variants which allowed for different clock rates of 50MHz, 66MHz, 75MHz, and 100MHz based on the 25MHz and 33MHz base clock rates. I had a DX2-66MHz for a while and a DX4-100. The ma…
Neutral
You're correct. My v2 comment was brought about by the marketing, not the technical facts. I had an Apple ][ and was excited by the Lisa, but couldn't afford one at the time. When the Macintosh came out, I found the screen far too small and I hated the the constant floppy disk shuffle. Obviously I didn't buy one. Ended up going down the IBM XT then AT path because I got to work with them and didn't have to buy anything. Back then a work perk was being a PC to work with. It wasn't until 2009 that I purchased my next Apple product, a MacBook Pro.
Doesn’t like it
I had something similar set up on my second to last work laptop. I had done some heavy customization that was mostly focused on common workflows for that job, but I have learned that I should still keep a backup even if most of it won't work elsewhere. I should have learned this lesson almost a couple decades ago when I lost all my emacs customizations on a personal computer. But instead, I decided to learn vim.
Likes it
Drafting was taught in my high school through the late 1980’s, and into college in the second half of the 80’s. However, in 1986, we had CadKey for the IBM PC, which could work with an optional mouse. The students who could afford a mouse had an edge. Drafting by hand is a lost art. It was fun - annoying when you made a mistake using .5mm HB lead and had to scrub the snot out of the paper to fix it - but something very real to it all
Likes it
If it was someone with an IBM PC XT, running MS-DOS and no hard disk, you'd lose every time. The ONLY hardware attack that worked that I'm aware of caused their monochrome monitor to fail, due to a design flaw. There wasn't anywhere you could tuck in a virus. We write protected our boot disks and important programs. We made copies and tested them. We knew what each program sounded like when it was working normally , and could hear each and every disk seek. We had capability based security, in a crude form... you don't.
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
Keyboards were always dangerous. Very first 1981 IBM PC 5150 had special diagnostic backdoor routine hidden in POST code: https://minuszerodegrees.net/5150/post/5150%20-%20POST%20-%2... IF REQUESTED, LOAD DIAG. CODE "Take the clock pin in the motherboard's keyboard DIN connector LOW for 40 ms. (Done by the KBD_RESET subroutine.) If the attached device responds with the byte of 65h, the attached device is a special IBM device that supplies diagnostic/test code to the 5150 via the keyboard port. If 65h received, load in the diagnostic/test code (255 bytes) via the keyboard port, then execute the code." Not that dangerous as it was only active for a split second during boot. But it gave peopple ideas. Zenith Data Systems implemented something similar in its ZBIOS, except meant to be active _at all times_ when computer runs :o seg000:7B03 in https://github.com/raszpl/Zenith_ZBIOS/blob/main/Zenith%20Z-... : seg000:7B03 Backdoor_loader proc near ; CODE XREF: Keyboard_Process_Modifiers+30↑p cli mov ah, IO_Port_64h_KBC_CMD_60_WRITE_CONFIG call Keyboard_KBC_command call Keyboard_KBC_wait_input_ready mov al, 5 ; magic Keyboard command to initialize backdoor code upload out IO_Port_60h_KBD_Command, al call Keyboard_Read_Synchronous mov cl, al call Keyboard_Read_Synchronous mov ch, al mov ax, 0 mov es, ax mov…