classic X86 hardware

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:00:56 -0500 9000 VAX <vax9000 at gmail.com> wrote: Some more that I would add: The IBM PC Convertable. (a truly bad laptop from the user's POV- probably as 'bad' a design as the Mac Portable) The Compaq Deskpro 386 (first generation 386 PC- Compaq's 'shot across the bow' at IBM, sorta) First PC-clone with 'real' power. Vintage PC-DOS. (I have DOS 1.0, the 1.0 Basic Compiler, the 1.0 Pascal Compiler) Useful for sub-64K DOS. The IBM PC-1 (the first generation PC, the one whose motherboard has four rows of 16K DRAM chips, and the cassette interface) The PC-1 is unique in having a power supply painted black, and the IO-slot cover brackets painted black. exceedingly rare. The PC-2 is much more common, chromed power supply and brackets, 256K (64K soldered in) on motherboard. The PC Junior (benchmarks 'Norton SI' at 0.7- no DMA controller, so glacially slow.) The Columbia PC (first DOS 'workalike'- not fully PC Compatible, with ISA slots. Any of the machines that ran MS-DOS 1.x on 8" floppies. Any of the early 'MS-DOS' clones, i.e. the Panasonic PC, that aren't fully PC-compatible and thus require their own special MS-DOS version. Tandy 1000's 'just barely' qualify here, because they were so common. And: the HP 95LX is 'cooler' than the 100LX and 200LX, though less useful, in that it doesn't have a graphics mode, so is a primative text-only palmtop. And because of that it's really cheap these days, < $20 on eBay if you look hard. The HP Omnibook 300- DOS and Windows 3 in a PCMCIA ROM- execute-in-memory so that it runs DOS, Windows, Word, Excel directly out of the ROM without loading it into RAM. A major technical accomplishment that was a dead-end development effort. CP/M-86. ------ A lot of the above are cool more as 'weird relics' than as anything technically neat.