Working Comcen Technologies Ltd IBM XT 5150 clone circa 1981

I have no idea what to do with this, as it's only showed up on the internet about twice.

It's a working clone of the first ever home "PC" - the IBM XT 5150. Made in Britain around 1981. My theory is it was a lot of money and taxes to ship a heavy computer from the USA so clones were made here in the UK that are functionally identical and are compatible with the IBM OS of the time, or more likely, DOS. The "IBM-compatible PC" is still the basis for "Windows" PCs today.

The hard drive spins up, it loads into its BIOS, and just needs to load an OS from a floppy drive. It has a floppy drive and a hard drive which is incredibly rare that they actually work.

It just needs an XT keyboard. They vary £20 to insane money for an IBM original.

You turn it on with a massive red switch and it sounds like a small plane. After it counts individual bytes of memory from the fully upgraded RAM (it has individual RAM chips, as you would have to pay for individual chips of RAM and plug them in), it beeps, and waits to boot an operating system from a floppy. Which could theoretically be installed on the hard disk. That's literally all it does without further input, but it works.

It has a monochrome (green) CRT display from a Russian company called Cheer. It's really quaint. Nice and bright with individual phosphors visible.

The case can be retro modded and you can even mod USB, flash memory and ethernet to it for Internet access to modern day BBS servers.

You could also upgrade it to VGA with original or OEM parts and get a colour monitor for it to play games like Monkey Island (I think). You could also add a sound card.

It weighs about 20KG and looks really cool.

It's a unique piece of British computer manufacturing history. Would a museum take it?

It's in almost new condition, despite being over 40 years old.

The hard drive alone is worth about £100 if it works. Most of them are destroyed.

Seeing as hardly anywhere on the Internet mentions it, I thought I'd write about it here. We probably have more SEO standing other than reddit, so if someone wants it, please contact me. I am looking to sell, or at the very least, get it to someone who can appreciate it. If not, I may do so myself and then sell it as upgraded/modded/working for retro computing niche.

Basically all similar IBM compatible parts sell on eBay consistently so I know there's a scene for it out there somewhere. It would seem a massive shame to break it down or scrap it.

It's the equivalent of something like a Colour TV Game 6 for Nintendo but for PC gaming that isn't a Commodore or Atari ST etc. The granddaddy of every PC anyone is typing on at the moment, except it was actually made here in the UK.

It looks almost exactly like this.

Edit: lmao imgur tagged my upload as potentially erotic imagery and then asked me to confirm if I was 18+ to view it

I did take some pictures of it working, so I will get them online at some point.

That is pretty effing cool Gecko.

Where did it come from?

It looks like it's in wonderful condition.

I'm sure there's a museum out there that would take it.

But it might be worth decent money! This is a different model, but is going for a small fortune.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/256075911345 ... Sws8xkYVVC

Ironhide wrote:That is pretty effing cool Gecko.

Where did it come from?

House clearance, essentially trash. It had their name printed on a label in dot matrix that I've removed, but it's still on the monitor. I saw the back of the computer, could see that it had expansion slots like a modern PC (like I say this is basically the blueprint for all modern PCs) - these are ISA slots - IEC/kettle lead power outlets and a small fan intake. But it looks like something far more robust than any PC I have ever seen. It has that cool almost military khaki/grey colour to the shell, and power coated black on the rear. The whole thing is built like a tank. I had to figure out what it could possibly maybe be because something just told me it was a special object and it was being thrown away as waste.

APS/Berk Ltd.

It appears to be someone's office computer that was kept for some reason or taken home (maybe once it was written off). There was an HP dot matrix printer as well, unfortunately I couldn't find or reach the keyboard.

Probably dead now.

You could get historical company accounts but only via the National Library now. Would indicate what it was used for.

Edit: Oh that name was still used by a company in the 90s since 1996 and dissolved in just 2022.

21200 - Manufacture of pharmaceutical preparations

There may be some interesting things on the hard disk but I can't boot it without a floppy on an OS and a keyboard.

btw those images aren't mine, it's the equivalent IBM computer. A bit of retrobrite or similar and it would look that good though, easily.

Moggy wrote:It looks like it's in wonderful condition.

I'm sure there's a museum out there that would take it.

But it might be worth decent money! This is a different model, but is going for a small fortune.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/256075911345 ... Sws8xkYVVC

That would be the IBM one, with an IBM colour screen (and VGA card), and the legendary IBM Model F keyboard - the keyboard alone, which uses very old mechanical switches with springs, can sell for hundreds, to mechanical keyboard freaks.

Broken down into parts, they might be worth anywhere £50-100 each to refurb other machines. As a unit, because it's so strawberry floating heavy and the hard disk could be easily wrecked, would be collection only for far below its actual intrinsic value as a working piece of computer history.

Bit stumped with it but I have seen them go for a few hundred albeit only once.

There's a whole retro computing niche on YouTube where content creators get tonnes of views for nostalgia - they could use this, turn over a video, and make a decent profit on that most likely.

Maybe I should just do it myself. I carried it in late one evening because my partner understandably gets uneasy about me dragging in old weird gooseberry fool like a cat.

Last edited by Ironhide on Sat Jul 29, 2023 6:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

As much as I find old tech interesting, I'd sell it.

Edit: actually, giving it to a museum would be a good alternative.

Green Gecko wrote:
Moggy wrote:It looks like it's in wonderful condition.

I'm sure there's a museum out there that would take it.

But it might be worth decent money! This is a different model, but is going for a small fortune.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/256075911345 ... Sws8xkYVVC

That would be the IBM one, with an IBM colour screen (and VGA card), and the legendary IBM Model F keyboard - the keyboard alone, which uses very old mechanical switches with springs, can sell for hundreds.

Broken down into parts, they might be worth anywhere £50-100 each. As a unit, because it's so strawberry floating heavy and the hard disk could be easily wrecked, would be collection only for far below its actual intrinsic value as a working piece of computer history.

Bit stumped with it but I have seen them go for a few hundred albeit only once.

I missed the part where you said it was a clone. It's still an interesting piece of history though and looks amazing.

Maybe email a few computing museums and see what they think?

Yeah, IBM PCs over here from the time seem to be rare. Almost all IBM PCs out in the wild seem to be still over in the states.

In England, we had things like Acorn, BBC Micro, Amstrad, Commodor and Spectrum, Atari etc. but PCs were pretty uncommon.

You'd maybe use it because software was written for one by a large company that did that in the states, or for whatever reason wanted a standardised computing model. No way to know really.

Green Gecko wrote:Edit: lmao imgur tagged my upload as potentially erotic imagery and then asked me to confirm if I was 18+ to view it

It belongs in a museum dot jaypeg

I just checked and this is the first result on Google for Comcen 5150, Comcen IBM Clone, and probably various other permutations, so it worked.

Blimey I probably just demonstrated how well ranked this site actually is terms of obscure tech/gaming related terms.

So err I'll write an article about it I guess??

I was thinking you could try to attach the hard drive to an old desktop, but if it’s that old, does the hard drive even pre-date IDE?

I've just spent a little time trying to find out info about Comcen PCs... with no success.

It's amazing how chunky and heavy older computers were!

How much for the box dude?

Last edited by Ironhide on Wed Aug 16, 2023 9:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

rinks wrote:I was thinking you could try to attach the hard drive to an old desktop, but if it’s that old, does the hard drive even pre-date IDE?

I'd imagine it probably predates IDE by quite a lot.

Edit: the first IDE hard drive was in 1986.

rinks wrote:I was thinking you could try to attach the hard drive to an old desktop, but if it’s that old, does the hard drive even pre-date IDE?

I think it might be a straight up 25 pin parallel port like you used to use with printers - the huge long ones. But it has a discreet hard disk controller card - which fits an ISA socket (the precursor to PCI, which is obviously the precursor to PCI-Express we have now - except again those interfaces are usually "bridged" i.e. embedded in the motherboard and you juts have a bunch of SATA sockets instead). Now we have hard disk controllers and connections embedded on motherboards, with this it's a whole separate extension to the motherboard just to connect a drive (or indeed, any kind of drive - I think it has a floppy controller as well, but that might be the same device).

I'll open it up tomorrow to take a look, and actually take some pictures over the next couple of days.

It really does lay out how a computer still works today, just there are all these individual modules, parts and chips. And also, no heat sink or fan except for the power supply :lol:

.

It probably doesn't get very hot as it's unlikely to be much more powerful than a NES. The clock speed is about 5Mhz or something.

Edit: Also, even if you did attach it to a modern system, it is probably not even readable - I'd be lucky if the format was FAT 16, I can't remember what DOS used (I think FAT was introduced with Windows 3.1) or it may use an IBM OS instead in which case strawberry float knows.

Edit 2: MS Dos did use FAT but the first version was FAT-12. It may well be readable with a parallel hard disk interface, if I powered it up via the machine itself. I wouldn't want to risk destroying it simply by reading and writing to the disk in an alien, 2023 environment.

Can someone on Reddit sideswipe some traffic from these forums? I don't post on any forums except GRcade because I have a licensing agreement. Just say you're helping out a friend who is trapped in another website - it's a disability. I have impaired mobility.*

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrocomputing/

*Actually true

Edit: Also this is priceless

Please kind soul remove the built in clock battery because it might leak and destroy this very important cultural artefact!

No cause for alarm dear friend, to get a clock on this computer requires an expansion card, that I do not have, hence there is no battery to fear. That was a feature on the subsequent model ten-sixty, quite something.

That's right, to get a clock, you had to upgrade your computer with extra components. Now consider yourself lucky you have a working clock in your computer.

I mean it literally couldn't even tell the time for strawberry floats sake (unless it was on, well, all the time). :lol:

It is the most basic boss of them all.

Ironhide wrote:
rinks wrote:I was thinking you could try to attach the hard drive to an old desktop, but if it’s that old, does the hard drive even pre-date IDE?

I'd imagine it probably predates IDE by quite a lot.

Edit: the first IDE hard drive was in 1986.

Five years too recent, the puzzle continues.
Here's an extremely long Wikipedia article that dives into the history of theee IBM clones (they basically reverse engineered the bias and then used off the shelf components to rebuild all of IBM's hardware;- as they had no patents).

Here's a collection of motherboards from the time: http://dosdays.co.uk/topics/xt_mobos.php

The quirkiest thing I noticed immediately was the AMD logo, on a CPU that is branded Copyright Intel 1978. But there are various compatible CPUs, made by NEC, Siemens, and even Sony.

Other chips are made by Motorola and Mitsubishi.

This a time when if you were dedicated enough, you could basically solder together your own computer.

Green Gecko wrote:
Ironhide wrote:
rinks wrote:I was thinking you could try to attach the hard drive to an old desktop, but if it’s that old, does the hard drive even pre-date IDE?

I'd imagine it probably predates IDE by quite a lot.

Edit: the first IDE hard drive was in 1986.

Five years too recent, the puzzle continues.
Here's an extremely long Wikipedia article that dives into the history of theee IBM clones (they basically reverse engineered the bias and then used off the shelf components to rebuild all of IBM's hardware;- as they had no patents).

I did a fairly tedious module about the origins of the 'modern' (circa 1998) PC at college (BTEC in IT and computing), forgotten most of it now though.

Working Comcen Technologies Ltd IBM XT 5150 clone circa 1981

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