24 Apr
2008
24 Apr
'08
8:25 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
It was possible to purchase a
really-stripped-down 5150 through various sources (probably gray-
market as I doubt that IBM sold them that way) with no cards or disk
drives and only the first 16K installed on the planar. I believe
that the San Jose Computerland offered that deal fairly early on. I
was never able to determine if they purchased the boxes that way or
canibalized the RAM for other machines. There was a DRAM shortage on
at the time.
Wow, I can't see it being useful at launch with 16K -- the DOS 1.0 took
up about 11K if memory serves, and command.com 5K all by itself... I
guess that left 1.5K to run BASIC.COM and that was all she wrote...
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
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