And btw: the
IBM XT originally came with 5.25" floppies the fixed hard
drive came later.
Dave.
The XT or IBM 5160 was announced and shipped with a fixed disk right
from the beginning, however its immediate predecessor the 5150 was a
floppy based machine.
I beleive it was possible to order a 5160 with 2 floppy drives and no
fixed disk.
The earliest 5150 BIOSes did not support extension ROMs, and thus could
not driectly boot from a fixed disk IIRC> But AFAIK all 5150s could be
interfaces to te fixed disk which was used after booting from floppy (and
loading drivers that way). later 5150s supported BIOS extension ROMs and
could boot from the 5160 contorller in the obvious way. The PSU was a bit
marginal, though.
-tony