26 Apr
2008
26 Apr
'08
2:31 p.m.
On Saturday 26 April 2008 13:34, Jules Richardson wrote:
They sure did that every time I tried it. :-)
They had to change, in order to survive.
(Snip)
Yes, they did,
but the fans were rated for 50-60 Hz operation and
impedance-protected. With the factory, what 62-watt?, PSU, I don't
think it was possible to stuff the thing full enough of drives and
cards to make it overheat
63W, I think - close! I did try and add a hard disk to my 5150 once, but
the supply just didn't have enough guts to spin up any of the spare drives
that I had. (which probably implies that maxing out the system would just
result in the PSU shutting down rather than going into some kind of
overheat condition) As this was an
IBM product, I fully expected that there would have
been some provision for changing the AC input voltage. Certainly
other personal computers of the time had the feature, and this wasn't
supposed to be a product from "Fred's Personal Computer and Aluminum
Storm Door Company". One expected a high level of engineering from
IBM.
Trying (misguidedly) to control the market by saying which countries which
machines could be used in seemed right up IBM's street, though (probably
not the case these days; as a company they seem a lot more flexible than
they used to be) What really puzzles me is that it wasn't a
backplane design - putting the
CPU and (basic) memory logic on the motherboard seemed a little odd, given
that a backplane would have given more card slots and more future upgrade
flexibility. It must have been obvious that memory and CPU technology would
improve, and that the number of expansion slots wasn't anything to write
home about.
Zenith did that with their XT-class machines, although it wasn't until much
later on (not all that long ago, when I was scrapping usable bits out of a
couple of machines that had been left out in the weather :-) that I realized
that the slots in those were different heights!
I'm sure somebody else did backplane-style boxes too, but that's all that's
coming to mind at the moment.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin