IBM ROM BASIC or lack thereof

From: Glen Goodwin <acme_ent_at_bellsouth.net>
Date: Wed Oct 3 23:16:06 2001

> Hmmm...are there EPROM's in it, or ROMs? I built a PC
> compatible with a bare board and stuffed the chips and
> soldered it when I was broke in college. The BIOS it
> came with wasn't very PC compatible. So (and I'm not
> making any excuses for this..) I wrote a program in
> disk based GW-BASIC (I actually BOUGHT it) that looked
> like it did something when in reality it was writing
> 2048K ROM images of the BIOS and BASIC ROMS of a real
> IBM PC to floppy. I took it to an IBM store (IBM had
> "stores" then) and told the salesman that I wanted to
> know if my program would really run on an IBM PC/XT. I
> ran it, it "worked", I said, "thank you very much",
> went to work, blew the EPROMS, stuffed 'em in my
> motherboard, and then, my PC, although it had a wooden
> case and a power supply shielded with Erector Set
> parts, was really, really, definitely IBM PC
> compatible!!

Brilliant move!

Glen
0/0
Received on Wed Oct 03 2001 - 23:16:06 BST

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