Slashdot Mirror
Neat IBM 5150 Case Mod
kminogue sent in a case mod that definitely is different then the ones we've been seeing lately. Instead of tricking out something ultra modern w/ lights and windows, this guy modded
an IBM 5150, yes, thats right, it's the original PC, back for a new generation. The color scheme is a little disturbing, but the end results are pretty sweet. To say nothing of the nostalgia I feel when I see that case. Update: 08/27 03:00 AM GMT by T : citroidSD wrote to say: "I put up a mirror at another stronger server."
That's really, really cool.
I just want to know if it's possible to squeeze something like a 12" SVGA tube (surely someone makes them?) into the old monitor casing just for added cheese value!
--
Windows XP. From the people who brought you Edlin.
You know, he could make computers with that color scheme, and market them to little kids as "The Barney Computer"! Seriously though, it's great to see the cool things people do with their old computers. I have to admit, this one is unique!
..wow, it's even got dual floppy disk drives!
Finding God in a Dog
Old saying? So is the case...
Case closed.
...Where do you get 5-1/4" blank floppies these days?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
for letting users post HARDCORE ASCII PORN which hurt my poor eyes? At least if it had been a high-res jpeg...
I'm pulling from some really old memory here, but I recall from many years ago that the very first IBM PCs had slots that were just slightly closer together than the AT standard used today. I recall seeing upgraded original IBM PC cases with the metal cut from between the slots on the backplate, and new screw holes drilled because of this.
This guy doesn't mention that he had to do anything special in order to make a modern ATX motherboard (still with AT slot spacing) fit.
Am I hallucinating here?
I know this is off topic but, looks like if /. is going to keep AC around they need to start IP logging
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
OK, OK pure caching is out of the question.
But one more question:
If google can link to both the original document and a cached copy, then why can't Slashdot?
I'm not much of a Van Halen fan, but it would be pretty funny to see an IBM 5150 case modified with the Van Halen logo.
Well, the site appears to be totally slammed.
So....Google to the rescue!
Here is google's cache of the main page.
Here is google's cache of all the pictures from the site.
Enjoy...
nlh
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
How the hell did he turn that laval lamp into a monitor?
" Instead of tricking out something ultra modern w/ lights and windows, this guy modded an IBM 5150,"
Well, why does something that's already "ultra modern" need tricking out?
Ok I can understand some good reasons why it's cool to rehash these old pieces of crap, ranging from "just plain fun" to "save the planet with the three R's". All very cool stuff, this example no less so.
But so far I've seen articles demonstrating dozens of example of modern equipment which has been modded and customized, including some neat stuff using "lights and windows". I've also seen a dozen or so similar articles to this one showing off cool ways to reuse old equipment.
What I'm wondering is why guys who are obviously talented at this type of reengineering don't design new and wicked cases *from the ground up*. So far I've seen only a single example, that completely transparent case (from those guys in Vancouver, BC ?). Sure there are a few mass-produced cases which have a custom look such as the penguin/cat/dog cases and such, and a few manufacturers have made the rare attempt (apple's cube anyone..?)but I'd love to see more.
Why can't we have geometric shapes such as spheres and pyramids? Or if not *that* different how about just a really COOL personal design of some kind that doesn't start with the usual "beige-box" syndrome....
ok. it's slashdotted so I didn't see the case. Was it Van Halen-ified: painted bright red with stripes of electrical tape all over it, like Eddie VH did to his guitar way back when. It'd be fitting, with 5150 being the title of the VH album/tune.
Here is a Mirror with pictures
You have to take into account that when someone mods a case by themselves, it will then be considered unique to them (even if someone else is probably doing something very similar). This is the Slashdot crowd we're talking about, the people who like to compile their own programs. If it's already done for them, what's the point?
I stole one of those old IBM's from someone's yard/trash pile last week, and I thought: "wow I should really make a cool looking case out of this!"
But I gave it to my friend the art major so he could make a sculpture with it or something.
Darn.
Dang, I was going to do an Apple II retro conversion, but this has taken the wind out my sails. :(
CmdrTaco calls someone else's color scheme "a little disturbing"?
I have a friend that is doing the same thing. His website is www.otakupc.com come check it out.
To fit the PC into the monitor case, and a flatscreen into the desktop case... Then you could really freakout coworkers when they see you sticking a cd into your "monitor."
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
I haven't got any pictures together yet but I've just squeezed a Celeron@1.1GHz (OCed of course) into a Sun SparcStation LX box.
I used an excellent motherboard from shuttle (the 7"x7.5" FV24) which includes almost everything onboard (from audio to network via firewire. Everything), so the build was easy.
I got the idea from a similar project I saw over at this place but because the FV24 is so tiny I managed to get everything, including a 1U psu, in the standard LX box.
It looks very odd indeed with my massive monitor perched on top... Retro modding is the way forward
0daymeme.com: Great stuff.
Methinks the case will seem somewhat less quaint with a sparkling new 17" monitor (I highly doubt he will keep that current one) showing a trademark MS BSOD. A Quantum 20GB hard-drive? I weep.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
check out a complete mirror with all the html and pictures in context on http://web.intru.de/mylinkz/retrocasemirror
after i spend 15 minutes trying to get them, i might as well post them again - the server seems to be suffering bad.
+++ath0
Not really... the aspect ratio is slightly different making it a real bitch to fit into the old casing.
Urban Detail
Perhaps he could hack into WOPR
Nah, you need an IMSAI with all the huge-ass, Fisher-Price lookin' toggle switches on the front panel for that. Not to mention an acoustic coupler modem, a good war-dialer program, and the help of Jim and Malvin (make sure you tell him when he's acting rudely and insensitively).
And you need to clean up the garbage the dog spilled out of the cans, right now!
~Philly
... because its sort of an in joke.
I just saw recently a computer in a He-Man/Greyskull Castle.
Its cool techinically and invokes your childhood for those who included He-Man. Not everyone gets it.
A computer in a globe is cool for about 2 seconds and your really can't talk/laugh about it.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
isn't 5150 a british legal document or status pertaining to incapacitation or madness? ergo, van halen's album, as well as a black sabbath instrumental by the name of E5150.
little odd that IBM chose these digits for its PC, eh?
would be filling a Unisys AN/UYK-7 case with modern stuff. Actually wiring the control panel to work would be a trick...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The original PC case had only five slots, so I ditched the bottom half years ago and installed an XT chassis with the full eight. This was about the same time I upgraded to a 386.
I kept the original top half, though, so my case still looks like an original type A, which is what it started out as.
The CD-ROM drive I put in it was a salvaged junker; it had a stripped gear which I rebuilt and now it works fine. But, while I had it apart, I spray-painted the faceplate and tray black to match the floppies.
Currently it houses an ATX motherboard with an AMD chip, two IDE drives, a 3.5 floppy, and a CD-ROM. I just got rid of the last 5.25 floppy when I put in the 30 GB drive... I'm thinking about putting it back now and losing the older IDE drive.
Despite what somebody else's post said, I've never had any problem with slot spacing. In fact, the AGP video card fits into the eighth slot perfectly, which is very convenient. And I salvaged a huge fan that fits exactly into the existing faceplate behind the slots (I haven't modified the front of the case in any way) so I don't require a blowhole. It's also convenient that my modern high-watt ATX power supply is so much smaller than the original 63.5 watt model... otherwise I wouldn't have enough airspace to cool the hotter modern chips.
The only real problem is that I've hacked out so much metal over the years (as I've gone through half a dozen motherboards) that the bottom part of the case has very little structural integrity left. If you pick it up without the top shell on, it bends from the weight of the drives. I added a steel bar taken from an old lamp across the top but that hasn't helped much.
My server, incidentally, is in a Honeywell DPS6 case. I find this highly amusing since I run linux on it... the gigantic case is nice for all my salvaged hard drives, and of course the UPS batteries.
--Charlie
Yeah, the color scheme is dumb.. and why did he throw a lava lamp in there? I guess it added the extra "piz-azz" to the newly modified case.
I had kept upgrading the internal Hardware in the case I got for the first PC I built for myself back in 1985. Looked identical to a 5150 Case. A 5160 case is easer because of the 8 slot design. The PC only had 5 slots and the spacing was wider than that used on modern MBs. The Last MB I had in the old case was a Pentium 133MHz. Went to a tower case in 1998. Got 13 Years of use out of the old case! I am resurecting the old machine with a 486-100MHz MB for running some of the old games I had back in the early 90's.
Taco, that box came out in 1981. Some of us here remember that year, with genuine nostalgia (Odessey, Coleco Adam, Apple // anyone?) You graduated High School (age 18, I'm guessing) in 1994. Which means you were born in 1976. Can a 5 year old honestly express nostalgia for a PC? You may have experienced the rise of the Internet and the Dot-Bomb Implosion with the rest of us, but call a spade a spade, and a kid a kid.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
...wouldn't a slot loading CD/DVD loading through the floppy slot be awesome?
SIGFEH
The site is Slashdotted. I made a mirror here, which is still being created at the time of this writing. It is mostly complete, though, so you shouldn't have much of a problem viewing it...
Do you like German cars?
nt
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
Seriously though, it's great to see the cool things people do with their old computers.
For sure!
I built a server once for a guy who didn't want to replace an old case he had kicking around. It wasn't quite of this class, it was a really nasty old 486DX-25 fullsize tower generic clone. But he *loved* that case, and wanted it to have a little more oomph.
Into that case, I was able to stuff an Asus ATX motherboard with a Pentium II 350 (back when they were still current), with many of the same obstacles this guy had in building his Barney case.
In the end, the ole 486 looked completely original. Keyboard adapter to get a Compaq Deskpro 286 keyboard (the old two-tone brown one) connected to it, and an NEC Multisync 3D. He used it more as a lightweight server, but especially enjoyed the look of the front LED display on the case still set to 25MHz.
One of my favorite pastimes is working on old cars, and this is very much the high-tech equivalent to stuffing a 7.2L Chrysler big-block V8 into a four door 1970 Dodge Dart. It's a Granny Car with an attitude. And I think a Celeron under the hood of an original PC certainly qualifies - especially with more attention to having it look dead original.
Here's my own sleeper. It's a Chevette with a Buick 231 V6 stuffed under the hood. It looks crusty, with faded paint and a cheesy hood scoop on it. But it pulls 12.8 seconds on the 1/4 mile, which is faster than the 13.1 the guy in the Camaro beside me pulled. Heheheh.
I love sleepers, whether they're computers or cars.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I can see having a retro case, but not something that was origonally purple! If I were going to do something like this, I'd make it out of a toaster. One slot for floppies, one for cd's.
I have an old atari sitting around its about 16 years old and spent the last 10 of those years in my closet. It runs the german atari OS and everything seems smooth except that i need to find a mouse. I'll post here if anything amazing happens.
Carpe meam simiam!
Iy your expansion cards are not full height or SCSI with the cables coming out the top, you can do this. I used to have a '486DX66/2 in an XT case - only problem is that the drive cage makes for hours of messing about to get any drives in and out. You could easily get a K6-3 AT board into one of these, only thing being to move the MB post holes, which just requires a little redrilling. Clone XT power supplies could easily do 200W, maybe 250W.
On that old case I even inserted a colling fan in the front of it blowing over the DX2/66 heatsink (with no CPU fan). Back then I found that most cheap CPU fans are not good for anything more than 6 months.
put a single board computer in a timex sinclair and make the keyboard work and interface video in to a tv. now that would look cool
but any car can be reasonably fast in a straight line. Show me a Chevette that can out-corner a 93 Prelude and I'll bow at your feet.
Who cares?
Most of Saturday night confrontation is stoplight to stoplight. That's straight line, baby.
Do you want a pissing contest between a Chevette with more than double the displacement of your silly little Honda? A rear-wheel-drive setup which is far better for handling and cornering?
Gimme two hours, I'll swap the front and rear shocks from drag shocks to a better rate for rally racing. Your only advantage with the Honda will be your independent rear suspension.
But, like every front wheel drive car, you won't be able to fishtail around corners.
That Chevette also has Fiero brake rotors and calipers on the front, Ford Crown Victoria full-size station wagon drums on the back, a roll-cage front to back, and I cut the dashboard in half to save six pounds. Six. The interior is a steel can with a driver's seat. That's it. And I personally bored that motor 0.030" over, shaved the heads to bring the compression ratio to 9.3:1, and ported and polished the intake and ports. The carb is a 600 CFM Carter ThermoQuad with a cool-can on the fuel line and a phenolic spacer to keep the float bowl from getting warm.
I'm a computer geek, but I'm also an old-school gear-head. I built the motor in my car. At this point, it's basically a NASCAR motor with two cylinders missing. You probably took yours to be "tuned" at a "speed shop" that deals in emasculated 4-bangers.
If you're like most Prelude owners I know, you've added 300lbs in stereo equipment, tinted the windows, put on $1,200 rims, and a big "Powered By Honda" sticker. (The "Powered By Honda" sticker might be impressive if you'd earned the right to put it on a Tercel.)
You're outclassed.
As a final warning, I grew up in Ottawa, Canada. Prime snowbelt. Lemme tell you, you learn quickly why cops and racecars *aren't* front wheel drive. And I've raced in several classes at both Luskville Dragway and Capital City Speedway.
Wanna go?
Care to race for pink slips?
Still so sure, buddy-boy?
I'd look forward to driving around with the crushed remains of a Prelude as the winter ballast in the back of my daily-driver 1976 Dodge Ram.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Since I have 50 Karma points to burn...
I agree with you 100%. It's one thing to improve the cooling of a case, but fancy paint, clear windows, lights on the inside, etc. is just idiotic and tacky. Case modders are like the lowrider crowd -- they spend a lot of time and/or money to make their machines look stupid and perform worse than stock (many modded cases spew RF, have inadequate cooling, have dangerous high voltages for neon lights, and have component access problems - like hinged doors disguised as 5.25" floppy drives). These people need to get lives -- or at least a little good taste.
So I go to check my email tonight, and notice that Eudora can't find my mail server. Thinking that my crappy DSL connection is down again, I open up a browser. Well my default homepage (Slashdot) comes up with no problems. So I figure I might as well skim the headlines and see what's new.... "IBM Creates 1st Single Molecule Computer Circuit." Hmm that sounds interesting, but let me skip ahead and see what else we havew. Oh look, someone modified a 5150 IBM case, I did something similar a while ago, maybe I should check it out..... Oh wait.... It links to my site.
Well, I'm happy and congratulate all that decided to slashdot my site and host into mush. I went ahead and mirrored it here if you still want to see my little mod. I think this server can take better beatings:
http://64.41.77.124/retrocase
citroid
i've been running a web server and proxy box in this same case for 4 years now. somehow it didn't seem that cool.
actually, it was all running on a 120 meg Mac IDE drive from Apple's first attempt at cutting costs by dropping SCSI. talk about a frankenstein machine, i didn't have the adapters to use a 3 1/4" floppy drive power with the big ol' honking drive power supply connectors, so to boot the box from floppy for the install I had to drag the thing over next to my main PC case and "jump" the floppy power over....
almost makes me nostalgic for my first days of linux use. almost.
I saw the 5150 designation and knew immediately and intimately the model in question. I disposed of several old chassis, and for some reason, I have kept one old original IBM Keyboard. The one with the awful loud click. It is original, and new and still in the box. Anybody know of a museum or something that might be interested???
What's the point of sticking new hardware into old cases if the old case doesn't look like an old case anymore?
It's called a hobby. Look into it. Hobbies are harmless and fun and in no way make a person a "loser."
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Best case mod I've ever seen was an Cray T3D unit case, the size of a fridge. It was sitting proudly in the middle of a lab at a software company I visited a while back, in the middle of the .com boom. It took me a little by surprise - This was a standard office building, on the eighth floor, complete with corporate pile carpet and flimsy ceiling tiles, and certainly not the right kind of environment for a Cray. But, then again, the company had just finished a remarkable round of financing, and their product had something to do with supercomputing (although it was clustering, not vector processing). The Cray was also making a really odd sound ... a high pitched whine, and a fast shuffling clicking sound.
My fantasies of actually being able to check out a Cray were quickly swept aside when an employee trotted up to the case, popped it open, and revealed the Hewlet-Packard "mopier" tucked inside, furiously spitting out documents.
After asking around, it appears they got the case (and it was a real case) from Cray because it had been seriously damaged when an (ex?) employee had dropped the unit to be shipped off a 4' loading dock.
Talk about an "Oh Shit" moment.
When I saw this mod a couple of months ago, I had the idea of converting an old ('87-'88 model)Compaq Portable(III) to a l337 LAN gamer.
m l
I've yet to find one for sale down here and posting this probably won't help my cahnces...
But here's what i mean:
http://web.wt.net/~damoore/oldcomp/cpq3/cpq3.ht
http://web.wt.net/~damoore/oldcomp/cpq/cpq.html
They're not exactly the same machine I have in mind, the one my dad had back then had a more prominent handle but you get the idea.
They're large enough and tough enough to fit anything you'll need for a damn fast gaming machine and be able to tote it around with you without fear of hurting it.
Another cool thing would be to use the inbuilt CGA as a second monitor for runnning diagnostics, statistics or whatever during LAN games, that's if the drivers required are fairly standard.
I did that several years ago, upped it to a pentium 75 for my original BBS, I still think they are one of the best cases going, uses a standard AT motheboard...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I know what hobbies are and have lots of them including woodworking, computers, SCUBA, motorcycling, boating, fishing, and lots more. I agree that a hobby does not make a person a loser, but there are certain hobbies that tend to attract people who are losers. Case modding and lowrider cars are two very good examples.
Spewing RF through Plexiglass windows and interfering with television is not harmless. All we need is some case modder interfering with the TV of some member of Congress and we may see legislation requiring that computers only be sold as FCC-approved, pre-built units. Do not be too quick to write this off as paranoid delusion. There are a lot of major U.S. corporations that would benefit tremendously if we all had to buy complete computers, rather than new motherboards and CPUs, each time we wanted to upgrade. Compaq, Dell, and Gateway, would love such legislation. So would Microsoft since each new big-name computer sold goes out with another copy of Windows. Once the ball was in play, the corporate PC giants would have "experts" testifying before Congress and making claims that home-built PC cause everything from cancer to aircraft navigation system failures.
Then the case modders would not be the losers. We all would.
At http://www.moddingzone.com/gallery/?m=001 (down at the bottom) this case has been showing off for about eleven months now. Old news...
-- http://www.jodal.no/
For Pete's sake, don't give them any ideas.
I think your[sic] the loser.
I am crushed. I live for the approval of illiterate, anonymous cowards on Slashdot.
O wait, you have one, making fun of people that enjoy what they like to do.
I also like making fun of people that dislike doing what they like to do. And let's not forget making fun of those who enjoy doing what they dislike doing.
Who the hell are you to judge what people like to do and how they do it.
I'm someone qualified to do it in this case. I understand RF emissions, PC hardware, and the legislative process. It doesn't take a genius to see that pollution, whether automotive exhaust, noise, or RF, invariably leads to restrictive regulations. When someone else's "hobby" looks like it may lead to restrictive laws that will limit my ability to enjoy my hobby, it becomes my business.