PC Ephemera

[Chuck Guzis]

On 10/27/2005 at 12:07 AM Adrian Graham wrote:

>I'd have thought this was worth saving if it's related to the 5150 XT, or
>at
>least it is to me. I'm trying and failing miserably to find an XT with a
>64K
>motherboard, purely because I guess people upgraded them as soon as they
>could afford to.

Mine was for the PC, not the XT; but even with 256K on the mobo, it wasn't
the memory that made me ditch the thing.  It was the FIVE EXPANSION SLOTS!
Consider that you had one slot for CGA, one for printer, one for a serial
port, one for FDC--and if you needed more memory, that was it.  I had a
homebrew board that hooked to an SA-1000/WD-1001 hard disk combo and I'd
reached the limit--and the power supply was getting stressed to the point
that you might have to power on and off several times before you got it to
quit kicking out.  

So, the next time the Taiwanese contingent held a show, I bought a clone
MOBO and nice 8-slot flip-top case and a whopping 150w power supply.  Duped
the PC's ROMs into the clone's EPROMs and could even run IBM BASICA.   I
never looked back.

Cheers,
Chuck