Fossilised computers...

[Boerseun]

After a few years of searching, I finally found what I was looking for:

A mint-condition 1982 IBM XT box, screen, keyboard, the works. It's so cool! It's been standing in a dusty garage for close on 15 years now, and I've just finished cleaning it. The owner had absolutely no use for it (save for a doorstop or an anchor), and gave it to me for free.

But here's the problem:

Upon switching it on, it counts and tests its memory (A FULL 128K WORTH OF RAM!!! AWESOME!!!) and then it says ERROR: Press F1 to continue... and that's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now - the last time I troubleshooted XT's was, maybe, roughly around 1990. I can't remember the error codes. I cannot get to the hard drive on this machine, and there's no way of interfacing the drive with my shiny new Athlon. Obviously. So, on pressing F1, like I'm instructed to do, absolutely nothing happens. Zip. It just beeps on the keypress, and that's it.

Now, I'd like to get this thing up and running, as a sort of mint-condition museum piece. I'd like to show my kids one day old programming by introducing them first to BASIC and GW-BASIC, proper old-school line-numbered programming. I think that'll be so awesome to illustrate the logic-flow. But if the hard drive is stuffed, I might as well give the whole contraption to my friend's kid right now to have him take it apart and play with it. He's now seven, armed with a screwdriver and dangeroud to any appliance in the house. I think it'll be cool to be allowed to strip a computer down to bits when you're seven. Nobody gave me one to strip down when I was seven!

So - anyone remember what that F1 error code meant on the old-time XT's?

[freeztar]

I am not familiar with those ancient beasts, but I have a couple ideas nonetheless. Does it have a CMOS battery? If so, that might need replacing. Also, I know this is more modern computer knowledge, but I have found F1 errors to indicate keyboard failure (although that doesn't seem probable if you're hearing a beep with each key press).

[Buffy]

Actually, it should have said something else after the word ERROR, indicating that your problem is "unspecified". I'm betting you've still got a short somewhere, so try cleaning the whole thing again well.

Also, did it count up to 128k more than once? My recollection is that the memory test goes by twice, and if its not making it a second time, then it may well be a bad memory chip, altough it should give you a code to tell you which one it is, so that may not be it.

Also, completely remove the hard drive. You may not know this, but like the Apple II, these things came with basic in rom, so it should at least boot to basic if its got nothing in it.

You've also got to get your hands on a Dos boot disk of vintage 3.11 to 6.0. (pre 3.1 did not support hard drives!).

Yes, I had one. Worse it was a PC 2 that came with 2 floppy disks! Mine burned up in the Great Oakland Fire, but I loved that thingy. The keyboard can't be beat! (You could probably knock out a cow with it...).

Good luck!
Buffy

[LaurieAG]

Hello Boerseun,

I had an Amstrad PC in 1987 (2 floppies + an added 20G HDD) and memory problems could be fixed by blowing the chips on the motherboard with a hairdryer set on medium. At work I was using a Unitron XT (clone) with a 5 MB HDD (with a Norton SysInfo of .98 of an IBM PC). We actually used an original IBM XT with an 8087 maths co-processor to do the Autocad plans for Australia's first cable TV network. Talk about slow, we had a complete defrag of the HDD in the Autoexec.bat each time the computer was turned on.

IBM Personal Computer XT - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The XT was released in 1983 so you may also have an IBM PC with a retro fitted HDD (and another set of problems). You can tell by the number of slots (5=PC). Also the keyboards are different to those we use thesedays and the operating system was PC DOS 2.0 on 360k 5 1/4" disks.

Finally, as Buffy said, if you can remove the HDD cable you should get basica, otherwise the PC is probably dead as well as the HDD. The HDD should be connected to a card in one of the slots.

[Boerseun]

Well, that's that. I found the problem. Turns out that the hard drive had an air filter! I kid you not. A device about the size of half a cigarette box, with a zig-zag compressed fabric cardboard-like air filter, not unlike what you get inside a car's air filter unit. It fits next to the stepper motor that pushes the read/write heads up and down the platters. It was loose. Dust got in and it seems a particle got caught between the platter surface and the head, because there's a nasty circular scratch exactly on the platter where the head is. Opening a hard drive is a terminal exercise for the drive involved, but I didn't had a choice in the matter. As I was looking on the net for info on this matter, my friend's kid decided to put the "lefty-loosey righty-tighty" screwdriver hypothesis to the test, with remarkably destructive results. But I did find the cause, though.

I have honestly never, ever, seen a non-sealed hard-drive, complete with an air-filter. And now, it turns out, I'll never see a fully-assembled on, either. Pity - it doesn't say anywhere on the hard drive what it's capacity is. I guess no more than about 10Mb - but, like I said, now we'll never know!

Also, on the back of the PC it says it was built in Scotland. I don't suppose they're building them there anymore.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Boerseun

I have honestly never, ever, seen a non-sealed hard-drive, complete with an air-filter. And now, it turns out, I'll never see a fully-assembled on, either. Pity - it doesn't say anywhere on the hard drive what it's capacity is. I guess no more than about 10Mb - but, like I said, now we'll never know!

The first PC-XT I laid hands on (ca. 1983) had a single 10MB hard drive. I never took one apart, so have little understanding of its internals.

I believe my brother-in-law still has my 1987 PC-XT (8088) clone, with a 40MB drive. Ca 2001, when I gave him a nicer box, the old one was still working fine, Hercules graphics card (I loved that card!) and all. It could even run its ancient (mid 1990s) DOS copy of Mosaic (or maybe Netscape – I can’t remember), via a 9600 bps modem, to surf the web.

I’d send you its old drive and controller, but the postage is likely to be absurd. Still, it goes to show that if you poked through enough closets, you’d likely find not only a working XT drive, but a whole working machine.

Also, even with its hard drive in piece beside it, your living fossil should boot to a 5.25” DOS boot floppy disk OK, even if, as freeztar suggest, it has a dead CMOS battery. As I recall, some of those old CMOSs had weird batteries, but could all be replaced by any 3V DC source, that is, a couple of AA[A] batteries in a homemade or manufactured holder.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by CraigD

Also, even with its hard drive in piece beside it, your living fossil should boot to a 5.25” DOS boot floppy disk OK, even if, as freeztar suggest, it has a dead CMOS battery. As I recall, some of those old CMOSs had weird batteries, but could all be replaced by any 3V DC source, that is, a couple of AA[A] batteries in a homemade or manufactured holder.

Note: you do need to find a 360k disk: the ROM knows nothing about the more modern "rigid-floppy" disks...

Also, I don't know when they added it, but I can assure you that the original PC2 (2-floppy) and first XT machines did *not* have batteries! Mine had an add-on card (I don't remember what it was) and a program reference in the autoexect.bat to get the time off the card. If you had nothing on it to do so, the first thing DOS would do was ask you the time and the date!

On the hard-drive: those slots are ISA, a standard that lived an awfully long time. You actually should have a pretty easy time finding an "XT-compatible" disk controller or even a disk that would fit into the cable off of the card somewhere, even down in the southern hemisphere there....

config.sys,
Buffy

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Buffy

Also, I don't know when they added it, but I can assure you that the original PC2 (2-floppy) and first XT machines did *not* have batteries! Mine had an add-on card (I don't remember what it was) and a program reference in the autoexect.bat to get the time off the card. If you had nothing on it to do so, the first thing DOS would do was ask you the time and the date!

I vague recall PC-XT clones that would, due to some little dead battery on power up, not only demand you tell them the time and date, but a bit of arcane data about their hard drive (# tracks & cylinders, etc).

My old box had a battery-powered clock that updated the system clock that fit between its 8087 coprocessor and its slot (it worked fine with or without an 8087 on top of it), a little gadget I found for about $20 at some computer store. Like Buffy’s card, it updated the system clock at boot time, via a line in autoexec.bat referencing an executable that came on the 5.25” floppy packaged with it. To set it, you had to invoke the executable with another command line switch.

It didn’t appear to have a changeable battery. When last I booted the box ca. 2001, the clock was within a minute or two of correct.