Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Eric Smith]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 1:51 AM Jim Manley via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> long before the Color Graphics Adapters were
> available, about six months after launch, and the CGAs were only
> produced in response to the completely unanticipated demand for the
> PC.
>

Are you certain? My then boss* and I went to a Computerland store in
Denver** on August 12, 1981, to pick up a PC that he had preordered***. My
(possibly faulty) recollection was that they had both MDA and CGA adapters
on that day, though they might not have had the CGA monitor in stock.

Our purchase included a PC configured with keyboard, 64KB of RAM, a memory
expansion board with another 64KB of RAM, a floppy controller, one 160K
floppy drive, a serial card, an MDA card, an MDA monitor, and (not
installed) a CGA card, and IBM DOS 1.0. We used the CGA card with an NEC
RGB monitor, and not all of the colors were correct. The NEC monitor wasn't
designed for the PC, and I don't think it had an intensity signal at all,
so we only got eight colors rather than 16. IIRC, yellow was brown, or
perhaps vice versa, due to an oddity of how IBM encoded a particular
combination of the RGBI signals.

The software and documentation included CGA support from day one, so it
definitely was not an afterthought.

In addition to IBM DOS 1.0, we very quickly got a prerelease version of
QNX****, and that was the first time I actually used a Unix-like operating
system.

Eric


* Jim Lauletta, founder of Apparat Inc, best known for TRS-80 products
including NewDOS/80

** on South University Boulevard somewhere near Evans Avenue, I think

*** despite that being technically impossible since the PC didn't
officially exist prior to that date; there weren't supposed to be any
preorders, but yet somehow there were

**** QNX wasn't officially released for the PC until some time in 1982