XT 5160

[Bjørn]

On Thu, 05 May 2005 09:28:40 +0200, Patrick Finnegan  
<pat at computer-refuge.org> wrote:

> woodelf declared on Wednesday 04 May 2005 10:04 pm:
>> Parker, Kevin wrote:
>> >Do you know what the popular choice was?
>>
>> My Guess is IBM-DOS ...  MS-DOS only came more
>> popular with the clones.   Now what programing languges
>> did you have back then? Assembler , Pascal and Fortran
>> come to mind.
>
> Erm, you seem to have left out BASIC, one version of which didn't require
> you to have disks to use (ROM BASIC); however, that was probably more
> useful on the 5150 PC than the 5160 PC/XT since the PC had a cassette
> interface you could use with it, which the XT lacks.
>
 From 1980 onwards I worked for a computer center which was one of the  
original IBM PC-vendors (in Norway, but the release was worldwide - we  
were sworn to strict secrecy before the launch). We never sold any  
casette-only or single-sided diskette models. I recall that we had a  
number of boxes with CP-M 86 on the shelf, but we never sold a singele  
one. We also had UCSD-Pascal(an odd operating system, reasonably  
cross-platform), but almost everybody bought PC-DOS.

All the IBM 8088-based PCs had ROM BASIC. That was not really useful for  
very much, except that you had a functioning computer even if you started  
it without a boot diskette. When the XT came around, we also got COBOL  
compilers which relied on BASIC for BCD arithmetic and conversion  
functions. When the first clone PCs arrived, the COBOL applications and  
compiler did not work on them until somebody came up with a TSR to replace  
the IBM BASIC interpreter.

Most serious programming was done in Assembler, including large  
applications like word processors. FORTRAN was also much used, and an  
important banking application was made in IBM Pascal. All the compilers  
were very expensive. The big breakthrough for hobbyist programmers came  
with Turbo Pascal, the first affordable development tool for the PC.

-- 
-bv