29 Sep
2001
29 Sep
'01
12:51 p.m.
On Sat, 2001-09-29 at 20:23, Don McClure wrote:
I found an IBM 5150 at a thrift store the other day. I
don't usually pay
much attention to PeeCee's, but the price of this one was about right--
$3.50 complete with dual floppies and monochrome monitor.
I don't have any boot disks for PC's this old. When I initially turned it
on, it would start up BASIC, which apparently is in ROM on these machines.
Lately, it hangs on a rapidly flashing left cursor, sometimes moving to a
rapidly flashing cursor at the top middle of the monitor.
Questions:
Anybody know what causes this? Power supply? Video card? Loose chip?
Re-seat the chips and see if that helps.
What's the deal with the BASIC in ROM on these machines? Any other early
PeeCee's have this feature?
All the genuine IBM PC's had ROM basic (I think some of the PS/2 might
have had this as well). This made the ROM difficult to clone while
maintaining full 'IBM Compatibility'.
Jeffrey H. Ingber (jhingber _at_ ix.netcom.com)
Thanks!
Don McClure
Bel Air, MD