The IBM PC XT, or model 5160, was the first IBM PC with a hard drive. Apart from the drive it is very similar to the original IBM PC. I bought this one from someone who found it when cleaning up their shed. It did not power on. After some debugging the issue was a capacitor that decided to be a short circuit. I replaced the other tantalums on the motherboard as well to be sure. Sadly the original keyboard was not fixable anymore and I made a PS/2 to AT converter so I could use a Model M keyboard I already had. Not the real deal but close enough :) At least I got a working IBM PC XT now
Surprisingly, the original hard drive still worked! It contained a few programs and games. I bought an ISA CompactFlash card as I do not trust the HDD to work forever and with that installed I backupped the games and such on the hard drive. The drive still works to this day but the CF card does boot a lot faster.
Of course, who wants to use only DOS? I found elks which is a Linux like OS but for older Intel IA16 devices. Neat! Installing this proved a little difficult as I just have 256KB RAM but with some help and patches from the developers I managed to do so. Thanks again! So if you want to run something neat and Linux like on an 8086, that's possible now, neato!
