13 Sep
2005
13 Sep
'05
8:22 p.m.
On 9/13/05, Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net> wrote:
The IBM PC (PC-1) had four banks of 4116 DRAM on the
motherboard...
Just to add more lore:
The floppy controller and floppy drive were very optional on the early
PC, and a rather pricey option...
Wasn't the pricing something like minimal equipment for $1695 or
$1895, but about $5K with maxed memory and two floppies?
I worked at Bruce and James Publishing when they released "WordVision"
for the PC - I still have my free copy - the back of the package says
"96K of RAM required. PC-DOS 1.0 or higher required. Floppy drive
required." They felt it was necessary to tell the potential customer
that they'd need a disk drive to use software distributed on disk.
The real "problem" with WordVision is that it uses a software timing
loop for key repeat. I ran into someone about 10 years ago selling
ancient copies of it at a HamFest, along with a patch to disable key
repeat. With that patch, it works fine on newer machines and newer
versions of DOS. I _think_ it works OK on 386s and DOS 3.3, perhaps
newer than that. Of course, without the patch, even breathing on a
key fills the screen with unwanted keystrokes. Works great on a 256K
5150, though.
-ethan