IBM XT 5160

Posted by musovern on Nov 17th, 2019 in IBM XT5160 | 0 comments

The IBM Model 5160 was as you might guess, a more powerful version of the IBM PC Model 5150. The ‘XT’ designation distinguished it from the 5150 ‘PC’.

It was introduced in 1983 and, like it’s predecessor the IBM 5150, it was available with either a CGA colour video card or a monochrome (text-only) MDA video card. It shipped with more RAM on the motherboard and had 163W power supply to better support the supplied 10MB or 20MB hard disk drive (increased from the 93W PSU used in the 5150). The (mostly unused) tape port mysteriously disappeared – a sign of the times!

The 5160 also featured eight expansion sockets instead of the five that the 5150 had. This was accomplished by reducing the space between each port and as a result, some early PC expansion cards will not physically fit in the newer 5160 model.

Slot eight was connected to the system bus in a different way to the other slots and had special signal timing requirements – not all expansion cards are will work in the XT slot 8.

This different slot was not present in any other IBM personal computers.

This is my unit which required a bit of modification to get working i replaced the power supply with a moden ATX one and also it never had a original keyboard so did a mod with a pic chip to get a AT keyboard to work with the XT. I also have a CF IDE for XT installed.

Once I had that installed replaced a few RAM chip and it passed with the diagnostic ROM installed.