classic X86 hardware

From: Scott Stevens <chenmel_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 20:37:57 +0000

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:00:56 -0500
9000 VAX <vax9000_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> Before you guys start to laugh at me, I would like to itemize some.
> 1. The original IBM PC 5150/5160 MB
> 2. The HP 100LX, 200LX palm PC
> 3. The original Nexgen pentium class PC
> 4. The IBM "butterfly" 486 laptop
> 5. You name it
>

Some more that I would add:

The IBM PC Convertable. (a truly bad laptop from the user's POV-
probably as 'bad' a design as the Mac Portable)

The Compaq Deskpro 386 (first generation 386 PC- Compaq's 'shot across
the bow' at IBM, sorta) First PC-clone with 'real' power.

Vintage PC-DOS. (I have DOS 1.0, the 1.0 Basic Compiler, the 1.0 Pascal
Compiler) Useful for sub-64K DOS.

The IBM PC-1 (the first generation PC, the one whose motherboard has
four rows of 16K DRAM chips, and the cassette interface) The PC-1 is
unique in having a power supply painted black, and the IO-slot cover
brackets painted black. exceedingly rare. The PC-2 is much more common,
chromed power supply and brackets, 256K (64K soldered in) on
motherboard.

The PC Junior (benchmarks 'Norton SI' at 0.7- no DMA controller, so
glacially slow.)

The Columbia PC (first DOS 'workalike'- not fully PC Compatible, with
ISA slots.

Any of the machines that ran MS-DOS 1.x on 8" floppies.

Any of the early 'MS-DOS' clones, i.e. the Panasonic PC, that aren't
fully PC-compatible and thus require their own special MS-DOS version.
Tandy 1000's 'just barely' qualify here, because they were so common.

And: the HP 95LX is 'cooler' than the 100LX and 200LX, though less
useful, in that it doesn't have a graphics mode, so is a primative
text-only palmtop. And because of that it's really cheap these days, <
$20 on eBay if you look hard.

The HP Omnibook 300- DOS and Windows 3 in a PCMCIA ROM-
execute-in-memory so that it runs DOS, Windows, Word, Excel directly out
of the ROM without loading it into RAM. A major technical
accomplishment that was a dead-end development effort.

CP/M-86.

------

A lot of the above are cool more as 'weird relics' than as anything
technically neat.



> cheers,
> vax, 9000
Received on Mon Feb 28 2005 - 18:48:19 GMT