This is a diamond in the rough! I saved it from the trash at my place of employment, along with a perfectly good 8513 monitor. They don’t go together, of course, but the price (free) was too good to pass up. The XT was IBM’s second personal computer. It featured an 8088 processor, a full height 360K floppy, and maybe a Seagate 20 meg hard drive if it was fancy! The keyboard had 84 keys (no number keys on the right hand side), and the standard monitor was the green screen slow-phosphour 5151.

After getting this XT back to my office, I realized it had several unique improvements, the most notable of which being the 286 card installed in one of the 8-bit slots. Not only did it have a 286 processor, but also the original 8088! Flip the switch on the back of the computer up, it boots as a 286. Flip it down, it boots as an 8088. Pretty cool, huh? Also, I managed to scrounge up a mint 5151 monitor to go with the XT. 84 key XT keyboards, on the other hand, are harder to come by.

The PC convertible was IBM’s first clamshell style laptop, introduced in 1986. It featured an 8088-4.77mhz processor, two 720k floppy drives, and no hard drive. Interestingly enough, peripheral “slices” (modem, port adapter, even a dot-matrix printer) could be attached to the back, in series, to extend the capabilities of the laptop.

This laptop came to me by way of a co-worker who just happened to hear that I collected old computers. She just came into my office one day and plunked it down on my desk. It was very complete, with the laptop, power supply, a working battery, nylon carrying case, and even some bootable DOS disks with Wordperfect on them. It looks mint, works beautifully, and I am very pleased with it’s presence in my collection.