Sometime in the last decade, I took a Craigslist drive to some guy's house, who had an IBM PC/XT he wanted to get rid of for $50. He did not know if it worked, but I took it home and found out that it didn't work. The motherboard was dead and the fan did not come on. Fortunately the parts inside that machine did all work except for one of the 360KB floppy drives. I believe it came with a Monochrome or Color Graphics Monitor. I thought I needed some space and threw away the case, the motherboard and the bad drive, being rather ignorant of potential diagnostics at the time.

I have regretted throwing away those items ever since. Some years later, I managed to acquire a working late XT 256-640KB system board. However, without an available chassis to put them in, the motherboard and many of the parts languished unused and unloved in my card box. I could make the system work, but it would be exposed to the elements and have little support for the cards, not a very practical way to maintain it.

This year, I managed to acquire a decent AT tower case from a guy who had a lot of excess parts to get rid of. There was a 486 motherboard in there, but it was dead. My primary 486 computer inside was a fairly modern desktop AT case, but I prefer towers to desktops for systems of this vintage. So I transferred my 486 motherboard from the desktop to the tower and finally decided to put the XT in the desktop.

Someone may cry sacrilege, having IBM parts in a non-IBM case, but I had no choice. Here are the specs of this XT :

IBM PC/XT
NEC 8088 & Intel 8087
640KB RAM on System Board
IBM Color/Graphics Adapter (Modded to the old revision)
IBM Diskette Drive Adapter
IBM Game Control Adapter
IBM Asychronous (Serial) Commu nications Adapter
IBM Parallel Adapter
Western Digital 1002-WX1 Hard Disk Controller
IBM 320/360KB Half Height Drive
Seagate ST-225 20MB MFM Hard Disk Drive

I have the original power supply for the XT, which works but does not fit inside the case. I believe the Craiglist XT came with a non-LED Model M keyboard, so I am using that. I can also use my 83-key keyboard from my IBM PC (although I am likely to trade it).

Ideally I would like to put these parts back in a real IBM. I have an MDA and a Hercules card which I can use for a dual monitor setup and avoid CGA 80-column snow, but Hercules works best with a faster CPU and my MDA card has an oversized black bracket made for the wider expansion ports of the iBM PC.