OT, but info needed: RAM uprade

From: Tim Hotze <tim_at_thereviewguide.com>
Date: Sun Dec 27 16:30:20 1998

>Not easily. The 8086 motherboard would be expecting 16 bit data from the
>CPU. It's possible to do something like that, but it's not a drop-in
>replacement. No idea why you'd _want_ to do that, of course.

Easy. If you had one and but not the other. But now, it's so fricking
cheap anyways...

>Give an engineer a copy of the PC techrefs and count how many times he
>says 'They did WHAT???' as he reads the schematics :-). It appears that
>if there are 2 ways to do something, the PC always made the worst >choice...

Remember who was making this: The IBM employees that wanted to be like
Apple. A bunch of rogues with a mission.... but not to much in the way of
$$$.

>AMD 8088 chips (and the peripheral chips like the DMA controller and
>interrupt controller) are quite common in IBM PCs, etc.

I figured. Most of the chips I've seen from that era in the x86 arena are
AMD or someone, but Intel less often than you'd think. (Or, perhaps, if you
know what I'm talking about, just as often as you'd think.)

>I believe that at one time if you bought an 8087 FPU from IBM as a PC
>upgrade you got an 8088 with it. Apparently some early 8088s (which ended
>up in IBM PCs) had problems working with the 8087 (I can't remember the
>details), so they gave you a 'good' 8088 to install with the 8087 just in
>case you had a defective one in your machine

Hmm... see, that just isn't an economical idea. It might make more sense
to write a utility that figured it out, or to do something of that nature,
hand them the floppy (or tape, etc.) then say 'check.' But anyway, I'm
sure it was pretty good on cusomer satisfaction. Besides, having a spare
can't hurt.

>-tony
Tim
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Received on Sun Dec 27 1998 - 16:30:20 GMT

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