9 Aug
2006
9 Aug
'06
11:55 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 8/8/2006 at 10:27 PM Jules Richardson wrote:
Aha - OK. Unfortunately the BBC gave us 4 days notice that they needed a
machine, which really isn't enough for me to dig mine out of storage, find
some software, and properly test it. I can't imagine the whole show is quite
so last-minute, though!
Do you mean that all the 5150's sold with
floppy drives were 64KB
variants?
(That's what I have - but I have no idea what was typical)
IIRC, you could get a "bare" 5150 with 16K if you were lucky, but the IBM
diskette-equipped ones all had 64K AFAIK. BTW, here's a link to the BBC WS programme:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/analysis.shtml
Rats - no realplayer or WMP here :(
Strange that the program doesn't even mention the
BBC PC.
What BBC PC? Do you mean the Acorn BBC Micro? I think the first few of those
were kicking around in late 1981 - which must have been almost exactly the
same time as the IBM 5150.
The Acorn Master 512 was semi IBM-compatible, but that was a lot later - circa
1986 (the Acorn ABC3xx machines were too and dated from about the same time,
but they carried no BBC branding at all)
Maybe the Beeb doesn't want to be reminded.
More likely that their workforce is made up of young blood these days who
don't even know that such a thing existed...
cheers
Jules