On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 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. :)
Oh, so do I...
-tony
Ok, I had to make another trip out to Weird Stuff today (I was in the
neighborhood to pick up some prescriptions, so I thought "Why not?"),
and I walked away with a few more bargains that will help build up my
PC software collection.
1) Ashton-Tate's dBase IV 1.0 - looks to be complete with even the
registration card
2) Ashton-Tate's Framework XE - sealed
3) WRQ's Reflection 1 for DOS - complete, even with bonus mouse pad
I plan on using Reflection as a front end terminal emulator for my
VAXen and HP 3000.
The best part was that these all fell into the $5 category. Even my
girlfriend was impressed, as two of these were good-sized boxes.
Oh, and I picked up a pastic 5-1/4" diskette holder (the snap kind
that holds 10 diskettes) for 50 cents.
Not a bad Sunday!
Mark