the stigmata of IBM feces

From: Tony Duell <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sat Feb 5 17:37:31 2005

>
> IBM is/was so big, and for a long time was so horizontally integrated
> that they made ALL their own stuff and/or had anything third-party house
> marked for them. This goes all the way down to resistors and capacitors
> on their boards.

At least they stuck to the standard resistor colour code :-).

>
> I think one day people will sort it all out. There will eventually be
> people wishing we'd saved all the weird IBM stuff.

I am thinking of parallels with HP. They often had chips house-coded (the
1820-xxxx numbers, etc). They used a lot of custom chips. But many of
their machines _have_ been fully understood. But my experience is that
the HP documentation did contain a lot more info than the available IBM
docs. Even things like a bus pinout or a memory map might give the clue
you need....

But yes, I guess one day somebody will figure out the IBM stuff too...

-tony
Received on Sat Feb 05 2005 - 17:37:31 GMT