That looks like an IBM PC. I recognize it from my childhood years when the father of a friend (who worked for IBM) had one in the early 80's. That dude is probably as nerdy as he looks. So not a dumb terminal, it's one of the first home computers.
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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Yep, looks about right. The photo to too dark to see the .25" drives but with all those boxes, it's clear it gets use. I can almost hear that damn dot matrix printer though because I had that model one at home as a kid . That thing was LOUD.
Or the satisfying ka-thunk when you pushed the bar on the floppy drive to lock the disk in place. We had a modified one when I was growing up that had a five MB hard drive.
Yup, I'm almost certain it's an IBM 5160 series, maybe even a 5162.
Not just confidently incorrect, but proudly incorrect.
And even if they were correct, what's the big deal? I spend half my life ssh'd into other machines, it means nothing what they're sitting in front of
Here an image of an old IBM-PC: https://www.7dayshop.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Ibm_pc_5150-1024x951.jpg Note that The dark area here is for floppy Disks. One to boot from and one for data, so it probably doesn't have a hard drive. I think it looks pretty much like the one in the meme. Also, computer desks like this were back then very common at home and probably not in offices or universities. Furthermore, he has several boxes with floppy disks beside the desktop. A dumb terminal would have no need for floppy disks, but one of the old PCs would need a lot of them.
So all in all, I think it is most likely a real computer.
Even if it is a terminal, its connected to a computer. Arguing otherwise is a bit pedantic, its not like he is physically on the computer/terminal either.
I see 3 boxes of 3M 5.25" floppy disks, and to my knowledge a terminal wouldn't have reason for those.
Except the computer is right there in the picture, it's what the monitor is sitting on top of.
He's literally at an IBM PC/XT or clone
RIP in peace, OP
True, he is sitting at a terminal - but it appears to be connected to an IBM 5150 or similar. So maybe not so dumb!
Looking at the rest of things more carefully - very likely a 5150, if not definitely. Iconic and hugely popular PC for its era, so it would make sense for sure.
Imagine the sound it made in its days, all those FDD and HDDs, I remember when I got my first PC in 1999, I found the FDD was surprisingly loud, like a dot printer, then my first CD burner, it was as loud as a hair dryer on turbo, fast forward to a few years ago, when I changed my case fans to Arctic P12s and had to double-check if my PC is on because I couldn't hear it, and now it's even more quiet because my new PSU funny spin it's fan in idle, unfortunately my GPU is loud AF when playing games, thinking about repasting it