1979 HP Collectors Dream 2649A model computer

[Scott Stevens]

On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 23:29:22 +0100 (BST)
ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:

> > 
> > On Wed, 17 Aug 2005, Tony Duell wrote:
> > > I'd love to konw how they get colour and grapghics out of an MDA
> > > card in an original 5150 PC. You did say 'any PC' after all :-)
> > 
> > Ehm, well, if I had been correct, I wouldn't have said 'PC', since a
> > 
> > LGP-30 is a 'PC', too, by the terms of its time ;-))
> > But IBM PC does not say anything about a specific graphics card.
> 
> You said 'any PC'. OK, I will read 'PC' to mean 'IBM PC compatible 
> computer'. thus rulling out things like LGP-30s, PDP8s, etc. You did
> not, however, specify a video card. I therefore assumed that any
> PC-compatible video card would work, and the original IBM MDA card is
> one such. 
> 
> In other words, a 5150 with an MDA card is a member of the set of 'any
> PCs'
> 
> -tony

Well, perhaps then _simple_ graphics, i.e. stuff created using the
line/box-draw characters in the MDA card.

I distinctly remember enjoying playing a very graphical version of
Othello on my dad's first-generation (PC-1) IBM machine with only an MDA
card.

I probably still have it somewhere.  There are a lot of .BAS programs
included with the first versions of PC-DOS.