A lost treasure: IBM PC AT (5170)

[Antti]

Back in the 2008, as a summer job I was working in a company that operated in the field of energy and heat products. Details aside, one day I was cleaning an old warehouse and I found few old computers collecting dust on a shelf in a corner. Of course, I was interested in computers so I asked my supervisor if I could take one of them. He laughed: "We're going to throw them away, just take all of them if you want". I took one IBM computer (with keyboard & monitor). I did not check what was the model because I did not know much about the IBM models then. It looked like it was in mint condition so I thought I could play Alley Cat on it.

Once I got home, I opened the case and cleaned it. Everything looked OK so I turned the switch on. PC DOS 3.?? (I do not remember the exact version because I did not pay attention to it) started and worked just fine. I had few old floppy disks (including the Alley Cat) and they worked just fine as well. The PC speaker was very loud. After few days, it did not look very interesting anymore. It started collecting dust in my room and I did not know what to do with it. After a year or something I was moving to another apartment and I wanted to get rid of all useless things. At university, we had an internal newsgroup for selling things so I composed a message: "One IBM PC for free, take if you want". One guy took it almost immediately. Everything good so far.

Not very long after that I started programming. Before that I was just a computer user. It did not take very long until I got into OSDev. Last two years I have studied a lot of computer science and now I know the computer I gave away was IBM PC AT (Model 5170) and it really was in mint condition. The company I worked for probably bought it in the eighties but they did not use it very long.

The fact that I gave it away is something I regret a lot today. It would be a lot more expensive than "take it for free" when I checked it on ebay today. Especially when everything was in mint condition, including the keyboard and monitor. It would have been extremely interesting to make some low-level programming on it because now I know something about programming.

I have planned to buy an IBM PC in the future. Probably I will not get one for free anymore.

[Nable]

Cool story, Antti! You've touched my heart, I have similar regrets about two 80286 motherboards, although their condition wasn't very good and they are not so antique as your treasure.

[qw]

I still regret selling my good ol' Commodore 64, even though the price was fair.

[siavoshkc]

Maybe you still can get one for free. Just look for it.