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To: martin_fierro

My first computer was the IBM XT 8088 in 1986. One floppy drive, had to insert the DOS disk, wait for the computer to boot, then take that out, put in the program disk, take THAT out, and put in the data disk to save.

Now we have "terabyte" hard drives.


5 posted on 08/11/2006 3:22:25 PM PDT by Christian4Bush (The only way to bring a permanent peace is to eliminate the permanent threat. - FReeper Optimist)
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To: Christian4Bush
.. the IBM XT 8088 in 1986. One floppy drive..

The XT shipped with a 10MB hard disk.

My first was the first model of the IBM-PC in 1983. Two floppy drives, came with 16MB of RAM installed, and 3 more 16MB kits (user-installable) for a whopping total of 64MB! I also got the color-graphics display. IBM employee price was a grand total of $2795.

The hackers at IBM went over the circuitry with a fine tooth comb, and the unofficial mods started appearing on the company conference boards... a reset button so when you hung up the PC you didn't have to recycle the power and wait for the power-on-self-test (momentarily grounded the "power good" line from the system board to the power supply)... a mod to the system board to support the "new" 64MB RAM chips (which was incorporated into the XT boards by Boca)... and I added a modulator and exciter to put the display on a TV set along with the monitor.

Then I got my XT, and some of my buddies got hold of a bunch of old RT 44MB hard drives which we re-partitioned and re-formatted and stuck 'em in our XTs.

Then I got my AT, and played with the RT drives on that one too. We later thought it might be fun to stuff it with RAM and see if we could get OS/2 1.1 EE to come up on it. Took about 15 minutes to boot, but it worked.

Those were the days.... ;-)

19 posted on 08/12/2006 3:35:41 PM PDT by TechJunkYard (jail Cynthia McKinney for assault anyway)
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