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. 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.