Teardown! Inside PC Labs’ IBM PC Model 5150
This classic, historic PC has been looking down on PCMag’s PC Labs for longer than anyone on our team can remember. For its big 40, we cleaned it up…and tore it down.
By John Burek
If you were to make a movie about the 40th anniversary of the IBM PC (August 12, 2021), my vote for a title would be: There Will Be Dust. That’s because it was my job to spiff up the old IBM PCs in PCMag’s PC Labs, bringing them back to the light for the big day. Achoo!
Over the decades, three 1980s IBM PCs, each with a matching monitor, have presided over PC Labs, stowed on a high shelf. Museum pieces, they’d survived actual use, multiple office moves, and the screwdrivers of countless curious hardware analysts. They’d been around so long that no one on 2021’s team could recall when last they’d been taken down, dusted off, and marveled over. Indeed, no one was even certain which models, exactly, they were.
I’ve spent many a day assembling and tearing down PCs, but I’m not a product of the initial PC generation. My first computer, circa 1984, was a cheap Commodore VIC-20. On a black-and-white TV, I keyed BASIC programs into it from magazines, saving them to the fussy cassette tape drive. (All the while, envious of friends with the much more capable C64 and its external floppy.) I splurged for an Apple Mac LC desktop…
