IBM PC from 1981 hacked to play full-motion video

A reader writes, "First released on August 12th, 1981, the IBM Model 5150 was the world's first PC. It came with a host of business and productivity tools, but only CGA graphics. Fortunately, a modder hacked one of these 4.77MHz wonders (640K RAM + 10MB HDD) to play full motion color video, running at 30fps." Link

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Gadgets • maker

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Brother Phil

Not bad, but it looks like character graphics, which isnt too demanding. I remember running Moraff’s VGAArt on a Hercules Mono card on my old XT.
JPW

Hold on–1981′s original 5150 had only a cassette interface, not a hard disk, and I believe a stock monochrome video card. Plus, RAM was 256KB max. Seems to me that this hacked machine might have been the 5160 (IBM PC-XT) from 1983.
jonbro

the link has a woefully small amount of information about the actual hack, here is the info from trixter directly: http://www.oldskool.org/pc/8088_Corruption
airship

Looks pathetic. The 1 MHz Commodore 64 has longer demos that run with 3-voice SID synthesizer music and full-color animation that kick this thing’s butt. And they did it way back in 1982, long before this guy hacked his old PC. It only took – what? – 26 years for someone to come along who was clever enough to make a PC do a halfway job of what the C64 did from the beginning!
RealCatholicMen

Ohhh, thanks Jonbro. I was wondering how he was doing the sound — Sound Blaster card! Those weren’t introduced until years later.

Great hack, though, and yeah, Airship, the IBM PC back in the day was really the bottom of the pile of all of the computers in terms of delivering entertainment. The Amiga, the Atari ST and later on, the Macintosh also completely blew it out of the water both in terms of operating system and integrated hardware.

The only thing the “IBM PC” really had going for it was a strong market to businesses and an architecture that could be manufactured by competing companies. My first PC was actually an 8088 4.77 MHz PC-clone manufactured by a company called Leading Edge.

It’s a shame, really, that the companies with better hardware and software couldn’t manage to also have better marketing strategies.
Mindbleach

Why does their flash video interface even have a fullscreen button if that’s all it does?
Zum Zamim

Let’s not revise history *too* much. This IBM PC was not the first “PC” by a long shot. Just the first IBM “PC”

I agree with the posters above that the 6502 based computers were initially more capable, and they came out in the late 70′s.
diluded000

And to think I was factory authorized to fix those things. g=c800:5
Stefan Jones

#8: Without googling: That’s the code you enter in DEBUG to start the low-level format program on a Western Digital hard drive controller card.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who remembers.

* * *

I’m going to guess that the video mode used is the present but never advertised 160 x 100 pixel, 16 color mode of the CGA card. I don’t think BASIC supported it, so you had to use machine language tricks. There were a few games that took advantage of it.
dculberson

We had pallet after pallet of 5150 and 5160 machines back in the early 90′s. I cry inside when I think about their fate. (Scrap.)

Each one would’ve been worth almost as much now as the (older) laptop I’m currently using. It would’ve also been cool to hang onto at least a couple. But, alas, you can’t keep everything. :’( sniff.
jphilby

Following on Zum Zamim’s note:

One of the “first” “personal computers” appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics in January, 1975 … over six years earlier. (Though early on they were known as “microcomputers.”)
IBM at first resisted going into the market, allowing hobbyists (and Apple — the Apple II appeared in 1977) years to “mature” the market. It might deserve credit for capitalizing “PC”.

“The Commodore PET, the TRS 80, and the Apple II, also known as the 1977 Trinity by Byte magazine, are often cited as the first personal computers.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_computer
Nick15

I’m not really impressed. I counted the pixels, it’s a 40×30 video (well, I counted 40 pixels across and I’m assuming it’s a 4:3 video). I figure each frame is about 500 bytes via JPG or GIF compression, although I’m sure the compression used is something else. Anyways, 30fps will make it 15KB a second, and a minutes worth of video is about 900KB? The actual video clip came in under 2 minutes, then figure in sound to be like a tenth of the video’s size so maybe the actual video file clocks in at 2MB or so? I can’t imagine that being something too hard for a computer of its age to process.
AliasUndercover

Say, isn’t that the machine John Titor came back in time to get?
OM

…Nonono! If you want to *really* impress us, do this in greenochrome, using a standard IBM Mono monitor and one of those old Hercules MGA accellerator cards. You know, the ones that Hercules denied for about a decade that they were actually blowing up monitors due to sync rate and voltage overloads?
eain

Kind of a shame that the YouTube video quality is so bad that you can’t really tell what’s happening with the screen in the shot… ;)