29 Jun
2007
29 Jun
'07
8:16 p.m.
> ahh, but do you know WHY the 5150 had those 5
ROMs, but 6 ROM sockets?
On Fri, 29 Jun 2007, Dave McGuire wrote:
No, but I'm betting you do. Care to share? ;)
UNCONFIRMED MS story:
IBM asked MS how much room they would need for the BASIC. (not counting
BIOS)
MS said "32K"
IBM's engineers felt that they had to allow for some overrun, and put in 6
ROM sockets instead of 5, to permit the BASIC to go over up to 40K.
Some programmers at MS were offended by the "lack of trust"; so, when the
BASIC ended up smaller than 32K, they padded it out with incomplete
enhancements to bring it up to EXACTLY 32K.
The guy from MS who told me that is dead, so I have no way to confirm it.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com