Today at work I was given another haul of old stuff retired from
the lab. I got a whole pile of 8088 IBM machines. Actually,
there were some XT clones as well, which I didn't keep as units,
but did salvage the cards and drives out of.
From one of the XT clones I got something I have heard
of but
never seen before: an 8-bit controller card for IDE drives. It
has a BIOS extension on it and some other chips, I haven't studied
it thorougly yet.
I kept intact the IBM machines, two complete PC-XT systems and two
PCs. I believe both XTs have the 64-256 motherboard. Most of the
boards in these systems are IBM originals, they all have 'AST
Six-Pack' style (not sure of the brand) memory and I/O expansion.
If I ever get the time (hmmm..) I may build a cassette drive cable
and explore cassette basic on one of the PCs (stripped down, of
course, to remove the 'optional' floppy controller.)
I am now the sole person in the lab still using the last two
PC-XTs (and a Commodore SX64) for actual data acquisition and test
purposes. I was able to grab and consolidate ALL the good parts,
so the machine in the lab I primarily use now has a special drive
controller (with BIOS extension) in it, so that the B: drive is a
1.44M 3-1/2" drive.
I also got an IBM CGA monitor in the haul today, and a number of
real IBM PC keyboards. There are also some 'third party'
switchable XT-AT keyboards. If anybody on the list needs a 'third
party' XT keyboard for the cost of shipping, drop me a note, I
will give away up to three of the ones I got today (and they
continue to grow harder to find) to the first three people
interested.