Talk:IBM Personal Computer

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Printer compatibility

IBM provided two different options for connecting Centronics-compatible parallel printers. One was the IBM Printer Adapter, and the other was integrated into the MDA as the IBM Monochrome Display and Printer Adapter.

The parallel port of the original IBM PC was not Centronics compatible. It had extra interface signals that prevented printing to anything other than an IBM-badged printer, which was an Epson unit. IBM had Epson bastardize the interface for this purpose. Third-party manufacturers quickly responded by adding the necessary signals, without losing true Centronics compatibility.

216.152.18.132 (talk) 20:44, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

Storage section has some contradictions

"After the XT was released, IBM altered the design of the 5150 to add most of these capabilities, except for the upgraded power supply. At this point adding a hard drive was possible, but required the purchase of the IBM 5161 Expansion Unit, which contained a dedicated power supply and included a hard drive. Although official hard drive support did not exist, the third party market did provide early hard drives that connected to the floppy disk controller, but required a patched version of PC DOS to support the larger disk sizes."

The above passage indicates that one was "required" to buy the expansion unit to use an HDD (due to the power supply), but then states that you could use drives that connected to the floppy controller in the PC. I've personally never seen a drive inside an IBM PC that connected to the "floppy" controller, but it should be quite obvious to the reader that this wouldn't solve the PC's power supply problem. The problem is not that there was "no place to hook it up to the bus". To do this you just needed an 8 bit ISA MFM HDD card with a built in BIOS (several options at the time including one from an XT).

Additionally, the image on the page in the "hardware" section clearly shows a 5150 with a HDD installed in the system chassis (the LED is square instead of round like the FDDs have). I doubt this drive was connected to the floppy controller. Either way, it contradicts the text that proclaims it's "required" to get the expansion unit to use a hard drive.

All that said, my own personal 5150 has a stock power supply and a standard st412 hard drive installed. Works without issue. 216.164.226.167 (talk) 12:43, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Move to SI units

The units in this article are not in Wikipedia-standard SI units. For example, the infobox says that the memory is " 16 KB – 256 KB". But that's not true. The memory was not 16,000 to 256,000 bytes. It was 16 KiB - 256 KiB. I believe that the units in this article should be correct. Simsong (talk) 23:34, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

kB = 1000 bytes, KB = 1024 bytes, so current use of KB is correct per WP:COMPUNITS ShadyCrack (talk) 03:54, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

Design process

The article states that "The IBM 801 RISC processor was also considered, since it was considerably more powerful than the other options, but rejected due to the design constraint to use off-the-shelf parts". But according to IBM 801 "The resulting CPU was operational by the summer of 1980 and was implemented using Motorola MECL-10K discrete component technology". This leads to this conclusion: IBM didn't use the 801 for its first PC because it would have heavily delayed the project not because of not being an of-the-shelf part. In fact according to IBM RT PC IBM built a PC on the 801 technology but it took another 5 years. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Klabauterfisch (talk • contribs) 21:20, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Longer list of 5150 model numbers

Longer list of 5150 model numbers = https://www.os2museum.com/wp/ibm-pc-5150-model-numbers/ - • Sbmeirow • Talk • 12:08, 29 September 2024 (UTC)