--- Bob Stek <bobstek_at_ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> For all the pissing and moaning today about IBM and Microsoft, let's face
> it - the original IBM and then the XT are collectibles...
> What can you do with them? Does the term "boat anchor" have any meaning for
> you?
I have a 5150 that is serving in its original capacity as a user-interface
for a Northwest Instruments bus analyzer box. The analyzer has a 68000 pod
and captures the last 4096 bus accesses. I used it once to prove to our
engineer that his 68010 design on our VAXBI COMBOARD(R) was screwing up
byte accesses (he swapped UDS and LDS causing byte reads to pick up whatever
happened to be the last upper or lower byte through the buffers - writes worked
perfectly because the 680x0 writes the same data to D0-D7 as D8-D15 on a byte
access). The 5150 itself came with an IBM-badged Epson something-X-80 printer,
an original mono card (the monitor is long since dead) and some form of
multi-expansion card (not an AST six-pack, but something like it). It also
has some form of 10-20Mb hard disk in it. I realize this isn't how IBM
shipped them, but it is how Northwest Instruments did. ISTR the price paid
way back when was $5K for the PC and $20K for the analyzer, but the analyzer
price _might_ have included the PC.
We boxed the whole thing up at work in a gutted VAX-11/725 cabinet. At one
point, we used 11/730s as production machines (linking binaries for our product
under a non-primary version of VMS) and it was cheaper to buy 11/725s and
harvest parts than it was to buy individual boards for the 11/730 (and a lot
cheaper than DEC maintenance). I don't have my working 11/725 anymore, but it
was a fun machine when I had it. With a bit of boot tape optimization, it
came up almost as fast as our 11/750.
-ethan
=====
Even though my old e-mail address is no longer going to
vanish, please note my new public address: erd_at_iname.com
The original webpage address is still going away. The
permanent home is:
http://penguincentral.com/
See
http://ohio.voyager.net/ for details.
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Received on Wed Mar 22 2000 - 08:58:16 GMT