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Writer's pictureJoshua McKelvey

IBM Monochrome Monitor Project


I have recently acquired this IBM monochrome monitor in the hopes of using it on my PC with a Hercules graphics card. This is not the original IBM PC 5151 monitor however. It is actually a IBM 3178 terminal's monitor even though it looks nearly identical. The difficulty is that it does not use the standard 9 pin connection and instead has a 15 pin connection like a joystick adapter. It also does not have a separate 120V power cable, it is assumed that the monitor gets regulated power from the terminal it connects to.

The documentation is nonexistent for this monitor, however I do have the schematics for the original IBM 5151 monitor that I am trying to make it into so I should be able to reverse-engineer the monitors circuit board using the schematics for the other monitor to find the pin-out of the monitor.

I am hoping that there is only a few different voltages that I need to supply; the worst case scenario is that I need to recreate the 5151's power supply completely.


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