31 Jul
2013
31 Jul
'13
6:22 p.m.
On Wed, 31 Jul 2013, Liam Proven wrote:
Perhaps I should clarify: I was not doubting you or
questioning your
machines, merely expressing my own first thought.
I guess it would be possible to have some kind of terminal emulator
for the PC in 16K, one which talked directly to the NIC, but if so,
how would they have loaded it? From cassette? That seems implausible
to me but then I was not using PC tech in 1981. I was 13 and saving up
for my Sinclair Spectrum 48K. :?)
POSSIBLE.
Not particularly likely, since floppies were available, and RAM [IFF you
did not buy it from IBM] was a TRIVIAL expense to bring it up to 64K.
Easier, as ONE vendor did, to sell the 64K for one price, and the version
for use in 16K for a bit more money, since the 16K version included 27
chips that you had to plug into open sockets on the motherboard. THAT
ploy was handy for dealing with Board Of Education types who sometimes had
a software budget, but no hardware budget.