Subject: Re: 8" DSDD disk From: "Randy McLaughlin" <cctalk at randy482.com> Date: Sun, 05 Jun 2005 18:12:47 -0500 To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> Sent: Sunday, June 05, 2005 4:24 PM Personally I think the basic design of the PC is bad but I've got enough 8" disks that if I could get $20 each I could build a newer better shop to work on my toys I truly love :-} I've always thought computers should be built to maximize performance, IBM not only appear to have ignored that but built down. They took a 5mhz brain dead version of a 16 bit chip and ran it on an 8 bit bus @ 4.77mhz and put a RAM limit of 448mb of RAM. The excuse of running 4.77mhz was for color burst but I never saw a video card that didn't use its own crystal negating the need for the 4.77mhz. In any case the extra $0.50 it might add to a video board versus slowing down a $3000.00 computer doesn't make any sense any way. In the 8088/8086 world I like what others did in the S100 world. They started with the 8088 simply to keep compatible the 8 bit S100 bus, later a 16 bit standard allowed for 8086's. The S100 systems generally ran at the full chip speed (5 or 8 mhz), allowed full 1mb RAM, didn't use 10% of the processor speed to refresh RAM.