8 Aug
2006
8 Aug
'06
3:12 p.m.
On 8/8/2006 at 2:42 PM Fred Cisin wrote:
IBM, and its retailers (including Computerland and
Sears Business Centers)
preferred to sell complete machines.
BUT, they would sell individual components.
Maybe so, but if you wanted a 5150 when it was first introduced (me), you
bought what was offered. And all Confuserland was offering was the 5150
with 64K populated-cum-disk drive. The IBM Sales office on Arques offered
to get one for me "in 3 or 4 months". I did have my choice of video card
(extra--I took the monochrome), skipped the monitor (rigged up an amber
screen Taiwanese import that could be goosed to go to 18Khz). I added a 96
tpi Teac as my second drive. Later, I acquired the 8" Shugart 4MB hard
drive and a WD1001 controller and wired up my own interface card and
drivers for PC-DOS. I went to 256K with the Purple Computing
"daughterboard" mod. I got rid of the thing when the Taiwanese clones came
out--just duplicated the 5150 ROMs into 2764's and used those instead of
the Far East BIOS. 8 slots instead of 5 was very nice.
I guess I wasn't interested in the minimum RAM--I paid $99 for the
miserable IBM Assembler (quality software by Microsoft) and needed enough
memory to run it. It wasn't long until I "acquired" a copy of Lattice C (I
still have it).
Cheers,
Chuck