I Got Lucky In Texas, The IBM 5155 is Back on Track
I’ve been kind of stalled out restoring the IBM 5155 portable for several months. It’s been on the end of workbench just waiting for a few key parts. I was beginning to think I just wasn’t going to find the parts I was looking for, then a miracle occurred! Well, it was a long-curated miracle but a miracle none-the-less. I found two nearly 40-year-old parts, NEW in sealed boxes.
IBM 5155 Portable
In the old computer collecting and restoring business you spend a lot of time searching for parts. I got the IBM 5155 Portable booting off a flash card a while back, so it is usable, but the real problem has been sourcing floppy diskette drives for it. It uses Qume 142 - 360K double sided double density drives with the IBM logo on them. The 5155 Portable came to me with two broken drives, not of the correct parts, crammed in the case to make the computer look better. I never intended to keep those drives regardless of their condition, so I started looking for originals a few months ago.
The Qume 142 drives weren’t great drives to begin with. They are belt driven rather than direct drive as was common that long ago. They were reliable when they were new, but old used ones are not.
For months I’ve been contacting salvage places, people on forums, and eBay listings. You’re chance of finding them working is basically zero. So, over the months I have probably bought 3 or 4 drives all in “unknown condition”. With many parts, unknown condition is somewhere between broken and perfectly working. With floppy diskette drives, “unknown” means broken (generally). And after several attempts, that is exactly what I had, a stack of broken drives.
I started combining parts, disassembling them, all kinds of things. Some would kinda work, some not at all, just a complete bust. And there is my 5155 just sitting there with two giant holes in the front. I don’t always track down rotational magnetic media but for this computer it’s kind of heart and soul of the thing.
As I pondered this problem one day, it dawned on me that I had seen one of these floppy diskette drives before. The first computer I restored was a PCjr. It had a faulty diskette drive as well.
Without much thought at the time, I got on eBay (this was more than a year ago) and started looking. I found a “PCjr Diskette Drive Upgrade Kit” that was new old stock (that means old but never opened or used). As IBM was approaching the home market with the I’ll fated PCjr they thought some people might buy a PCjr without a floppy diskette drive. Once the consumer had the computer for a while, they would realize that not having a diskette drive sucked and want to add it, so IBM made a kit. It had the diskette drive, a carrier plastic piece, a fan, and diskette controller card. Being IBM, they made quite a few of them. Well, hardly anyone A) bought a PCjr in the first place, and B) if they did, they got it with the Diskette Drive from the beginning as this was past the era of the cassette drive loading software. So as a result, a lot of these kits were stashed away in old warehouses. When I bought the kit to restore the PCjr I didn’t think twice about, I needed a drive, I bought the kit.
Fast forward back to now. I started googling a bit and found out IBM shipped that floppy drive with PCjr’s and IBM 5155 portables and only those two computers! Wow, this would be my ticket, if I could find two PCjr Diskette Drive Upgrade Kits (unopened) I would have the two drives I needed, new none the less!
After searching for some time, they never came up on eBay. I started hitting the forums I regular but nothing. One guy mentioned that Computer Reset in TX had a stack of them a while back. Computer Reset is a salvage place that has/had tons of old computer gear that people are welcome to come and haul away. I think most gets sold on eBay. He said they were all gone now, but there were several of the Upgrade Kits there recently. I tried to join a computer forum for the Dallas Ft Worth area as that is where Computer Reset is located. The forum moderator would not let me join as I did not live there but offered to make a post for me about trying to find the Kits.
Sometime went by and then last week a guy from TX messaged me on Facebook that he had two kits. He offered to sell them to me for $30 each. That was a GREAT deal compared with my past experiences (which I won’t enumerate here).
My two New, Old Qume 142 Floppy Diskette Drives, never used
Today they arrived and it’s like a miracle. They work perfectly, like they just rolled off the assembly line, which they did 37 years and 11 months ago! One kit was sealed the other had been opened but by the guy I bought them from.
I threw them in the test mule 286 computer, and they work perfectly. This was a total bank shot and it paid off eventually. Frankly this is kind of the fun part of doing this. Finding just that correct part you need.
Back on track with the IBM 5155!
Testing out the new drives in the 286 Test Mule computer