IBM PC parts

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Thu May 4 15:01:45 2000

On Thu, May 04, 2000 at 02:46:14AM -0700, Mike Ford wrote:
> Was it really "later", or was the 64-256k an option available at the same
> time as the 16-64k?

I'm 99% sure it was "later". I bought my 5150 new in 1983, and there was no
choice in mobo, I got the minimum config of 64 KB and one 160/180 KB disk.
I'm glad that the mobo could take more because I had to immediately upgrade
the machine to 128 KB, MASM 1.00 was claimed to run in 64 KB but evidently
that was under PC-DOS 1.x. I splurged and spent the extra $20 for PC-DOS 2.0
and at ~21 KB it was so bloated that MASM wouldn't fit! And even once it was
working, it couldn't take pathnames in filenames (very annoying for INCLUDE)
since it still lived in FCB world.

Still have the machine, but I swapped in a V20 CPU at the earliest opportunity
(and lost the 8088 many moves ago) so I suppose I ruined any "classic"
value it would ever have. Awwww... I also fried the MDA in the course of
some modifications (#1 was to double the memory so it could display 50 lines
of text with interleave, no flicker at all with that soupy IBM monitor, #2
was to add color support and change the base I/O and mem addresses, screwed
something up there), but I like the HGC+ better anyway.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Thu May 04 2000 - 15:01:45 BST