On Sat, 06 Feb 2016 18:23:39 -0500, wrote:

On Sat, 06 Feb 2016 17:16:34 -0500, wrote:

On Sat, 6 Feb 2016 14:23:45 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/06/2016 01:05 PM, wrote:
On Sat, 6 Feb 2016 11:48:14 -0600, philo wrote:



Understood.

I was not terribly interested in computers at all until I got into
digital photography. Though I am not usually an early adapter, I started
in the year 2000 when it became affordable.

I had a "first day ship" 5150 PC1" but I bought it used in 84 from the
guy at work who bought it originally. That had two 128 m floppies, 16k
and an 8088.
It kept getting upgrades as I accumulated parts and ended up being
640k with a 30m Seagate.
My next machine was an AT in a wooden box. ;-)




Back in my experimenting days maybe ten years ago, I was given an ISA
memory expansion card.

Just to see if I could do it, I bumped the RAM up on a 286 I had to 16
megs, the maximum a 286 can address. At the time the 286 was built, even
if one could have put in 16 megs of RAM it would have been unaffordable.

This is the PC AT I built in the wood box. It had 6 meg on an
expansion card and 512 on the system board. I had 4 meg of that in a
ram drive and the rest for the system. dBase IV was really the only
thing that used anything above 640k in DOS

http://gfretwell.com/ftp/Woodiy%20AT.jpg
http://gfretwell.com/ftp/Woodiy%20AT%20inside.jpg

I'll bet it didn't pass FCC or DOT certification - or UL either!!!!


The problem was IBM did not think to put PCs in our budget and we
could not get any.
There were no "clone" cases that would take PS/2 parts

When I threatened to start building woodies, my boss said "you know
how to get parts don't you"? (I had a $12 million dollar parts room
right next to my desk)
After that my next boss would just show them off to people and brag
about how resourceful his people were.
By the time I finally got someone who was freaked out by them, we
were downsizing admin people and PCs were a dime a dozen.