16 May
2010
16 May
'10
10:06 a.m.
> Nice!. I rememebr buying my first PC-family
machine -- an IBM 5160. I
[...]
Oh yes... my first IBM PC was a 5150 with dual-floppy
drives and a CGA
display. I went and bought a Quadram Quadboard, filled it with 384K
I forgot to mention. My first 5160 was a dual-floppy model (no hard
disk). Yes that configuration was official. Both floppy drives have the
IBM logo on the faceplate.
It took me a long time to find a CGA card for it. I could get a clone one
from the local PC shop back then, but that was one ASIC
and a bit of RAM.
I wanted (and eventually got) the full-length IBM one with a 6845
and
rows of TTL packages.
On the other hand I was less fussy about the serial card. The clone one
of those was a couple lf 8250s, 1488s, 1489s and TTL for the address
decoder. Trivial to produce a schematic of and keep going.
This XT now has 4 floppy drives (2 3.5" ones in an external cabinet), 2
hard drives (again in the extenral cabinet), MDA, CGA, 4 serial ports, a
24 line 'user port' and so on. Of course I did the modification and put
640K of RAM on the motherboard.
and dove right in. I later bought an XT controller
and a 10 MB hard
drive so that I could run PC/ix (which I am still looking for; I have
I bought Minix for mine.
[...]
I really
don't like this cavalier approach of getting something out of
storage and powering it up without doing any tests first. But anyway...
Neither do I, but I take what I can get. :)