XT 5160

On Thu, 05 May 2005 09:28:40 +0200, Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> wrote: From 1980 onwards I worked for a computer center which was one of the original IBM PC-vendors (in Norway, but the release was worldwide - we were sworn to strict secrecy before the launch). We never sold any casette-only or single-sided diskette models. I recall that we had a number of boxes with CP-M 86 on the shelf, but we never sold a singele one. We also had UCSD-Pascal(an odd operating system, reasonably cross-platform), but almost everybody bought PC-DOS. All the IBM 8088-based PCs had ROM BASIC. That was not really useful for very much, except that you had a functioning computer even if you started it without a boot diskette. When the XT came around, we also got COBOL compilers which relied on BASIC for BCD arithmetic and conversion functions. When the first clone PCs arrived, the COBOL applications and compiler did not work on them until somebody came up with a TSR to replace the IBM BASIC interpreter. Most serious programming was done in Assembler, including large applications like word processors. FORTRAN was also much used, and an important banking application was made in IBM Pascal. All the compilers were very expensive. The big breakthrough for hobbyist programmers came with Turbo Pascal, the first affordable development tool for the PC. -- -bv