Same people are still paying a friend's paycheck there. It doesn't matter, just a combination of branding / marketing anyway. On 2/14/2013 10:20 AM, Fred Cisin wrote:

----- Original Message ----- From: "Cindy Croxton Electronics Plus" <sales at elecplus.com> To: "'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts'" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 2:21 PM Subject: RE: Who were the worst of the worst? My first new brand name PC was a Packard Bell 286, they were selling like crazy at Sears because they were cheap. It was reliable for me, and to a friend I sold it to when I built my first 386. They did have crappy keyboards and the worst monitors out there (.39DP VGA for example when most others were using .28). You get what you pay for , and that was at a time when there was a decent profit margin to be made selling cheap computers.

----- Original Message ----- From: "David Riley" <fraveydank at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 2:25 PM Subject: Re: Who were the worst of the worst? Those fake cache 486 boards actually do work well (have one here) and will even use a real cache DIMM if you install it. The major problem with PC Chips is they used 3rd party chipsets that were not exactly the fastest out there (BX named chipsets people confused with the Intel variety on P2's for example).

----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 3:38 PM Subject: Re: Who were the worst of the worst? I think they were one of the last makers of AT form factor motherboards for cheap upgrades of old machines. Think I have a couple AT P2 boards from them.

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 4:16 PM, Jason McBrien <jbmcb1 at gmail.com> wrote: ISTR some games that had to be released in Tandy 1000-compatible versions, but perhaps that was due to video hardware that wasn't really EGA or VGA-compatible at the register level. -ethan

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 5:15 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: The bit I remember is they heavily marketed them at K-12, where, in a lab setting, the IR keyboards would interfere with each other.

[PCjr keyboard] FGred, I am amazed at you... It's a 6p6c conenctor. It's not an RJ anything. It does not carry telephone lines. -tony

I think the FG can run at both 300rpm and 360rpm, the G is only 360 rpm. Sorry about the way I phrased that. I had had some very bad news earlier i nthe day and was even less myself than usual. Yes. I _think_ the cable diagram is in the Techref. For some reason the techref I boguht doees not include the keyboard schematic (it includes just about ewverything else, even the 5152 (Epson) printer and 5153 CGA monitor schematics). It wasn't hard to reverse-engineer the keybaord circuit though. -tony

I thought the Tandy 1000s were designed to use existing _Tandy_ cables and joysticks. That is, the joysticks were the smae as for the CoCo, the printer port was a 34 pin card edge (so as to use M1/3/4 cables) and so on. Tandy and Amstrad machines had one accessory available that AFAIK was not avaialbe for other clones (it was avaialbe for IB< 5150/5160/5170 machines). This accessory is rather important to me. I refer, of course, to a schematic diagram. -tony

On Fri, 15 Feb 2013, Chuck Guzis wrote: I had a Sumicom System 330 for a short while back in the late 80's. It wasn't 100% compatible, but it was a nice machine for what it was. The thing I recall most about it was the silk screen on the boards - they used yellow instead of white. Pretty neat looking. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_!

On Sat, 16 Feb 2013, Chris Tofu wrote: Holy shit! It's a talking plant! g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_!

On Feb 14, 2013, at 3:38 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: Apparently their post-486 boards were more or less fine (with the usual accoutrements of a very-low-cost motherboard of the time). No one says bad brands have to stay bad (good brands certainly don't always stay good). The Red Hill site I linked to does point out that aside from the fake cache issue, those 486 boards worked mostly OK, perhaps because the cache RAM was one of the major points of failure on a PC motherboard of the time. - Dave

On 2/14/2013 11:53 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote: Packard bell as in the PC company had zero to do with the original company of the same name (TV sets etc.). It was licensed by a mob in the San Fernando Valley in the LA area and was just a mashup of parts The IBM PC Clones started out from a couple of designs, one of which I know was done in Orange County, ca by a guy who basically took the IBM PC tech reference and a copy of the bios and basic roms and built up a board which would run with those chips plugged into it. I bought a bare board and built it up. Later he went bigtime and called himself "Super computer" and stopped selling bare boards, but I saw lots of the same boards and ones from the same mask (the layout was by hand and had unique features) in lots of clcones. Later as the companies in Taiwan grew, they could not ship stuff fast enough apparently and a large number of family members in the US at least in the OC area started up computer stores. I bought from two and knew the people at both ends of the line, and all of the Acer and other Taiwnese company stories matched with only differences in scale and people. For some reason the Koreans could never do anything right. They bought up another company for real $$ started by some friends here, Micro 5 and attempted to go big time with that company selling Novell servers. That product made a lot of server companies or broke them. The Koreans (Samsung) sunk that company like a brick after buying them by taking the main thing that M5 did special away and saying "you don't really need it" All of their customers with any engineering resources did what they should have, re-engineered their main design, and the few small ones went with a friend who had a deal with Samsung to make the original hardware and made him a lot of money. BTW the feature was the M5 386's and Pentium motherboards had lots of slots, I think one bit tower had 13 slots. Samsung pulled that hardware and pushed in their own with only the usual number of slots, and lost all the customers. Somehow they though since they were building servers they could buy up the company and jam their own Novell kit down their throats. I think that operation cost them in the tens of millions in the final analysis The repeated the same operation but at the cost of in the billions was Samsung acquired AST Research. same story lots more money. BTW, A S and T made out well, though T had gone off some time before from the company. So bottom line, the contents of the boxes were just a shuffle from one month / batch to the next. The main building blocks I saw fights about were mother board reference designs / chipsets, where to get memory, how much to pay for a bios (40,000 AMI), where to get boxes, where to get hard drives to put in the boxes. You would have seen various headlines and advertisements when these were going on, but the driving force were the business maneuvers behind these and the players not the designs. They didn't matter.

On 2/14/2013 1:04 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: "In 1986, Israeli investors bought the name for a newly formed personal computer manufacturer. Originally the company produced discount computers in the US and Canada. When it left the North American computer industry in 2000," REading over more of what is there I do recall a fuss about them trashing windows, but they tried to put up a startup thing to assist buyers in the center of the bell curve with no chance of figuring out the product. Microsoft forced that off by changing their licensing, and everyone had only some useless buttons to add, which made the PB marketing people and I think one other obnoxious sort to look the same (as the article points out) as everyone else. With an inferior product, the crashed and regrouped. I know at least them leaving involved this area (Southern California) because the Packard Bell junk wave was one of many I can name. Not as useful as most, but did produce a lot of cheap video cards, and the like. I think they had something going in Thousand Oaks from some memory. The article says a call center in Utah, but that was unlikely to have any shipping involved. The investors were Israeli from the article, not sure if they drove tanks. as a thread hijack if anyone reads this far, name the "junk waves" you have seen / are seeing. I mean if one junk dealer has it they all have it. In Orange County Packard bell was one. Kaypro Grid Drivetec 2 or three OC based S-100 operations. Vector Hamliton liquidating their Sun hardware / design consulting division. In the Bay area: Who remembers the Godbout Auction in Santa Clara, trying to pump up business at one of the swap meets there. Later same when compupro sold out and crashed. One of my friends and I visited on it years ago, and he said "they won't consider me as a viable supplier of parts when they have money and are on the way up, why should I treat them special when they are screwed and come to me with junk". Jim

On Thu, 14 Feb 2013, Chuck Guzis wrote: I am amused by the use of the word "leading"

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 10:38:56AM -0800, Fred Cisin wrote: In the early days, some companies were afraid of getting sued by IBM (while most of them were totally fearless), so they'd go out of their way to add stupid incompatibilities. I put together a machine (on a rackmount panel) based on an Eagle 1600 motherboard, back when they were dumping those cheap, and it was close to useless. I had to patch the BIOS to work with a normal FDC board (IIRC they'd pointlessly changed the DOR layout), and while it was nice that using an 8086 instead of an 8088 bought some speed, the fact that they didn't account for that in the (8-bit-only) ISA bus interface broke most software that touched the screen etc. ... since the high halves of all word accesses were lost, so you had to special-case your code accordingly. More recently, clones have been great. Whenever people ask what hardware to use to run my stuff, I say cheap no-name junk is the way to go. All those guys have going for them is compatibility! It's the big names who like to have gratuitously unusual hardware or write their own not-quite- vanilla BIOS, and that's where things get nasty. John Wilson D Bit

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 03:27:39PM -0800, Chuck Guzis wrote: Um, OK. I'm not familiar with the Eagle PC. Sure but the 1600 wasn't just some random 8086 machine, it used the ISA bus and a similar BIOS and kept the usual things at the usual addresses, except for the annoying changes. Absolutely! Too bad that turned out not to matter. Having hardware to split 16-bit bus cycles into two 8-bit ISA cycles would have been very nice, but other than that it was a decent design, and quite a bit faster. I'd forgotten about the assumption of 96 TPI drives, but come to think of it I did have to dig up a pair of TM100-4s to make it work. Luckily they were kind of black sheep at the time (not useful on most new computers), which made them actually cheaper than TM100-2s. That was a real shame... Yeah it seemed like DOS was going to be CP/M all over again, but the 5150's market share reached critical mass so that it got hard to resist reaching out and touching the hardware, since that worked so much better than using either DOS or the BIOS. A month or two of a *good* programmer's time back then (to put good drivers in front of the hardware) could have prevented all that... But no. John Wilson D Bit