For me the difference comes down to whether you have a hard drive or a dual-floppy.
The 5150 was the first 'business class" computer that I recall using. Two floppy drives. The lack of the HDD leads to a particular workflow and places limits on the software that you can run. I remember lots of disk swapping. I also remember the built in ROM Basic, and playing with that occasionally when there was no disk in the drive. This provided a nice bridge from my prior computer, a Coco-2, which of course came with BASIC in ROM. As far as the cassette port, I never used that and I assume few people ever did. The card slots are limited, but that's part of the fun, adding in something like a Six Pack Plus. My first experience was with with MDA and a monochrome monitor. CGA and Hercules were something I only read about in PC Magazine. Of course, these computers were meant to be upgraded, and often were. Adding the expansion chassis is a perfectly reasonable period accurate thing to have done. There were even 80286 upgrade boards that replaced the main CPU. So you really can justify almost any configuration that you can build. There is no wrong answer. After the 5150 my next experience was a Tandy 1000. Constrained on slots, but with better graphics, better sound out of the box. This was where I had my first HDD, some clunky external thing with a ribbon cable. Scott On Wed, Aug 12, 2026 at 4:51 PM ben via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2026-08-12 4:58 p.m., Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > > On Wed, 12 Aug 2026, Jim Brain via cctalk wrote: > > . . . > >> a lot of work, and I am trying to decide how important it is to have > >> both a 5150 PC and a 5160 XT, since the XT was such a marginal update > >> to the PC (-cassette, bit newer BIOS, 8 slots instead of 5). The PC > >> setup I have already has 11 slots combined, an HDD, and full memory, > >> video, and KB. > > > > Other than leaving out that it has a more powerful 130W, instead of 65, > > you summarized the differences > > > > BTW, with trivial mods, you can populate it with 2 rows of 256K + 2 rows > > of 64K, to bring it up to the 640K maximum. > > > > -- > > Grumpy Ol' Fred [email protected] > > > Are there any generic machines or modern rebuilds (static ram) to > replace a 86 and a 386 for those that > still need a machine for vintage I/O cards? Your typical US Nuclear > power plant comes to mind. > > PS. Avoid any surplus PDP's that glow in the dark.:) > PPS. Did they have problems when a PDP-5's ran power plants? > > >
