On Wed, 26 Aug 2020 at 15:10, Bill Degnan
<billdegnan at gmail.com> wrote:
I remember when the IBM XT was too new for a VCF exhibit, back when
Sellam ran
shows.
I can believe that.
I gutted 2 original working PC-ATs in about 1996 for cases for
Pentium-class machines. I deeply regret it now but it was 25y ago --
they were only about 10y old and not remotely collectable or even very
interesting at the time.
I still have 2 MDA cards and one screen from them.
The perspective is of a person who was not
really part of the XT class
machine world when they were
pervasive. To me he seems to be exploring how
they work as he teaches
his son, but I guess most people
forget at this point how to use a PC and DOS.
Exactly, yes. The PC came out nearly _forty years ago_ now, and only
middle-aged types like myself (52!) remember them when they were new.
I didn't see one until Uni in 1985, when I was 17.
Working adult IT professionals in their mid-twenties to early 30s
today grew up only with multicore 64-bit machines and have quite
possibly only used SSD-equipped machines at work. Most have never seen
or used a floppy diskette or CD-ROM, and machines with ISA slots and
optical drives disappeared when they were small children. They might
never have seen or used any kind of rotating or magnetic media
whatsoever. Some I have personally encountered have never used a wired
network connection.
The era of 16-bit machines with rotating 5?" media (floppy, hard or
optical) that you can _hear_ turning, that take time to get up to
speed, where as you wait a minute or two for it to creak into life you
can _hear_ motors whirring up, is as unknown to them as spinning the
thread to make their own garments.
For me, who started out at work on a PC-AT and worked on PC-XTs, it's
a smooth continuum, but it's easy to forget that it really hasn't
been, and the days of text-only single-tasking command-line machines
with moving parts are last century...
--
I delivered in a truck to the set up in Quebec the 20 IBM XTs that you see
in the movie Xmen the Apocalypse. I retrieved them after the filming. I
could set up an office or classroom of XTs. A funny if not impractical
practical joke
B