Re: a question on history of personal computer
From: Bill Vermillion (bv_at_wjv.comREMOVE)
Date: 02/26/04
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Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 15:05:05 GMT
In article <NzRUb.16559$bp1.719845@news20.bellglobal.com>,
Oliver O'Boyle <o.oboyle@celerica.ca> wrote:
>
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>> >after 8", there was actually 5.25" 1 sided, which = 1/2 of 360K!!,
>> >then high density and double sided disks came around. i remember a
>> >computer teacher of mine in elemtary school who used to flip the
>> >disk over and insert it back into the Apple II so it could write
>> >on the other side!! My fisrt PC was in '85, just a few months
>> >after MS-DOS 1.0 had come out.
>>
>> MS-DOS 1.0 came out in 1981. MS-DOS 2.0 came out in very early
>> 1983, and Norton wrote a very popular book on it before he started
>> writing all the Norton utilties.
>see, that's what i've been trying to remember exactly. i might have
>had it in 83 or 84 then in that case. i can't seem to pin-point an
>exact time and i'm basing a lot of this on when i got a copy of 2.11
>which i thought was around 86 (but again i could be off here). as i
>was only about 8 or 9, i can't remember all the details as well as i
>would like :). but are you sure 1.0 came out that early? i used 1.1
>for quite a long time. then jumped to 2.11 and used that for even
>longer. used 3.x for a bit then 6.2 (i think), then 6.22.
1.0 came out with the first PC from IBM and that was announced
in August of 1981. I first sat at one at a dealers and was not
impressed. It looked like a warmed over CP/M to me, and the video
was slow. I remember bringing up a full-time BBS about 6 weeks
before that machine hit the market.
When Norton brought out the book on the 2.0, I read it, and it
looked like MS had gotten the OS right. [That shows how gullible I
was then :-)]
So after going through that book, I bought a naked IBM PC. $1385
with 16 of RAM on the mobo, and a cassette of BASIC. That was
really empty. I then got a video card - color cards were in short
supply and then got a Maynard Sandstar card to run the floppies.
The floppy controller card, which could have serial and parallel
ports added, was about $200 and the 5.25" floppy was $225 -
discounted.
By late fall of 1983 I kept winding up on my Z80 based machines as
their interactive use was better as they used a memory mapped
display and were blazingly fast compared to the process that IBM
used to get to the screen. Shortly after that I got my first Xenix
machine and never looked back. That was the time I made the change
to my 3rd career - computers.
-- Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com
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