Fond Memories of my First PC
RSS feed
Email alert
You must sign up or login to contribute to the APC forums
New user
2 posts
Posted: 14/06/2008 12:06 AM
|
My first PC was an IBM XT, a big machine with 640k (that’s right, less than 1 meg) of memory, twin 5.25" floppy drives, a mammoth 20 meg hard disk, and a CGA monitor with 8-bit colour. This was fairly high end for the time. It ran PC-DOS, IBM's branded version of Microsoft DOS. It was a bit more expensive than the “home build” specials offered by different retailers, but there was some sense in buying a PC from a manufacturer that had been making mainframe computers for years. Maybe its graphics weren’t as good as Apple’s Lisa (which I had used at work), but the Lisa was over $10,000 dollars back then – you could buy a new car for a lot less. And the IBM (or compatible) came with software that was more useful to me.
I loaded it up with WordStar (anyone remember that?), Lotus 123, Borland Turbo Pascal and Assembler. I used it for all my uni assignments, printing them out on a clunky 9-pin dot matrix. That PC was very reliable - years of service with never one problem.
Another of its strengths was its open architecture. Anyone could build hardware or write software for it. I did my little bit - writing a couple of TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident) that ran in the background to do things like print spooling. Memory was always a problem - the 8-bit architecture meant it was limited to 1 Meg of memory. One of the solutions was an expensive memory card that added 1 or 2 megs and used a special driver to switch a 64k frame buffer into the free area above 640k. It cost almost as much as the PC, so I wrote my own driver (VMS40) that used a file on hard disk to emulate EMS memory. It was slower but it worked fine with programs such as Lotus 123.
It came with all the standard connectors of the day – parallel printer port, serial port, separate ports for keyboard and mouse that were easy to distinguish (the keyboard was round, the mouse was another serial port).
Like many people, I gave the XT a few upgrades – one was a hard disk controller that doubled the capacity of a hard disk by writing twice as many sectors in a track, turning the 20M hard disk into a 40M hard disk, and a 100M hard disk into a 200M hard disk. Another was a faster processor that was pin compatible with the original and ran at twice the speed. For anything Dos based, it was fast enough, and all the games ran at reasonable speed.
Nothing was plug and play, so installing a network card meant using jumpers to set the interrupt number, and if you got it wrong you turned the machine off, opened the case and tried another setting. No one expected the OS to support any hardware you installed – they all came with software on floppy disk that you installed before the system would recognise that you had installed new hardware. Which makes me wonder why everyone expects Vista to support every new piece of hardware out there? The manufacturer makes it, they write drivers for Vista, or you don’t buy their piece of junk. Am I missing something here?
Although 8 bit colour graphics was limited, that didn’t stop games coming out that made use of it – games like Lemmings, Leisure Suit Larry, Myst and Doom to name just a few. That was also the era of shareware, because there was so little good software around, and commercial stuff usually cost an arm and a leg. That was also the time when people who used shareware generally paid for what they used. Some shareware authors made a lot of money out of shareware, but unfortunately I wasn’t one.
After a few years the 386 chip came out, and I bought a 386 based PC from a reputable dealer. I think it had something like 4M of memory and a 100M hard disk. It lasted about fifteen months, during which it suffered 3 hard disk crashes (each replaced under the 1 year warranty), and then the power supply blew up, destroying the motherboard. The hard disk survived, and was migrated to the XT, where it continued to work for years.
I bought a 486, and that lasted a couple of years before going the same way as the 386. It ran windows 3.0 (the “real mode” version that preceded 3.1), but it also had Ami Pro – the first windows based word processor. I think my wife made more use of the 486 than I did, liking Ami for her assignments. When it died I replaced it with a Pentium I - 133 running windows 3.1 and a newer version of Ami Pro. The old XT was capable of running windows 3.0 plus the old version of Ami Pro, and gained a new lease of life, although I still used it mainly in DOS where Turbo Pascal and WordStar ran fine.
Eventually the XT was repurposed as the internet connection computer, with a dos based proxy server, and we had a small home network consisting of 3 machines. Those were the days when you could go online with a 2400 baud modem and not worry about trojans or worms or hackers. (Firewall? What Firewall?)
The XT never missed a beat for over 14 years, when the power supply finally gave out. By then XT power supplies were as rare as hens’ teeth, so I removed the hard disks and sadly let it go to the recycler at the local tip. All I have left is the original CPU sitting on a bookshelf, and the hard disks stored in a box. If it had lasted a few more years I’m sure I would have tried installing Linux on it, just to see if I could. None of my other computers has lasted as long as the old XT. I guess they don’t make them like they used to.
|
|
permalink
Digg
Slashdot
send to a friend
|