The second thing you noticed was the clarity of the characters on the monochrome screen - 40-character screens were much more common at the time. It was built like a tank and weighed more by itself than some laptops do today. The thing you first noticed when you used a PC was the keyboard. ![]() With all of that I had a "complete" home computer system. And I had an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. There was a BASIC interpreter built into ROM and I had bought a word processing program called Volkswriter. It had a monochrome screen and ran DOS 1.0. It had 64 kilobytes of RAM and a single 360K 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. ![]() That, combined with the fact that it could handle 16-bit calculations, combined with the ability to add on the 8087 math co-processor, along with a maximum memory space of 640 kilobytes, made the PC a very powerful machine. This was a blazing clock speed for the time, almost five times faster than the Apple II or IIe. It had a 16-bit 8088 processor running at 4.77 MHZ. The IBM PC, although pathetic by today's standards, was very powerful for its time. Since the PC came from IBM, it had a strong reputation behind it. By introducing the PC, IBM gave personal computers real credibility. IBM made big, mainframe computers for major corporations. ![]() It is hard for us today to realize how big a deal this was, but you have to understand the reputation IBM had at the time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |