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Personal Computer Oddities (by John Koziol)

  • Artigo

I recently had a conversation with a friend and casually mentioned the IBM PC/XT-386.  He'd never heard of it. So I got to thinking...what other weird PCs had I run into over time.  Here's my list of machines I personally worked with:

IBM PC/XT-386 (late 1986) - A 16MHz 386 chip on an 8-bit XT motherboard.  Acted like a supercharged XT and had all normal RAM and AT-bus speed issues to boot.  AFAIK, only purchased by DP managers inordinately influenced by IBM on-site staff.

DEC Rainbow (1982) - A Z80 and 8086 (or 8088?) in one box.  It could run CP/M, DOS, and could also boot into some sort of dumb terminal mode. Had a PITA floppy drive, as I recall, that threw out a lot of read errors.  Popular for word-processing, though.

Apple III (1980) - Pretty high-powered 8-bit business machine for it's time but had severe reliability problems.  Used an OS called "S.O.S" which, I forget what it stands for, but we called it the "S**t on S**t" OS.  I once had a buttload of these surplused in my garage.

IBM Personal Portable Computer (1983?) - We called it the "Luggable".  The built-in screen was amber, not green, and surprising legible. Had half- or third-height floppy drives that you couldn't use to format normal floppies.  They could read and write normally, but disks formatted in the Portable were unreadable by desktop IBM PCs.  I was working on a project all summer of '84 from home with this.

AT&T PC6300 (1985)  - A client of mine standardized on these machines in early '85. The HD controllers and HDs broke down constantly on these ugly things.  It was AT&T in name only; once you popped one open it was all Olivetti.

NEC MultiSpeed (1985?) - My first "laptop".  Had twin 720K 3.5" floppies and a B&W monochrome screen. 512K of RAM I think.  I'd sit by my apartment pool with a bootable disk with MFOXPLUS in one drive and my project in the other and code away....that is for about 35 minutes, when the battery failed.  I was single at the time and this was the only way I could look "cool" at the pool.

There were others who's names escape me now.  Please add to the list!

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