3,615.65952 m/sec
March 29, 2018
Steel Survivor: An IBM XT Tale  
This month actually marks the IBM 5160's 35th birthday, so why not show off my working (and pretty much complete) specimen. This is one of the later models: half-height floppy drive + ST-225 hard drive, 640K motherboard (fully populated), last BIOS revision (05/86). The latest date code on the chips is 8649, so this machine was made shortly before the XT was discontinued altogether.     I received this from
Trixter, truly a gentleman and a scholar, along with a separate box of stuff to round it out: an IBM PC/XT keyboard, a joystick, some software/games (including a boxed IBM PC-DOS 3.30), and the Guide to Operations. The machine itself is very well-equipped too, complete with an XT-CF adapter, an IBM CGA board, and a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0, but more about that in a bit.    
   
This thing went through a bit of a misadventure en-route to me. USPS turned out to have some inexplicable restrictions on package sizes to
