Month: June 2020

Documentary: How and why IBM made the first PC

Posted on by ajross

IBM released the IBM PC 5150 in 1981. Internally, IBM went through massive hurdles to get a personal computer to the market to compete with the other microcomputers of the time. This documentary shows all of the happenings organisationally as well as the trade-offs and decisions that led up to IBM choosing the sluggish 8088 CPU.

Some of the main reference material: BYTE Magazine, September 1990: https://archive.org/stream/byte-magaz… “Bill Gates, Microsoft and the IBM Personal Computer” – Infoworld Newsweekly, August 23rd 1982: https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=V… “Microsoft Announces 8086 Basic” – The Intelligent Machines Journal, Summer 1979: https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=F… IBM Exhibits: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhib…

IBM PC – The first games ’81-’91: Part 7 (1987)

Posted on by ajross

Wow! The #DOS games of #1987 really turned a corner! Digitized sound, colourful graphics, gameplay keeping up with the other contemporary machines of the time. This was the year when people started to notice that the boring beige box in the corner could actually be a serious games contender. From 1987 there was no stopping it! Games like Sid Meier’s #Pirates!, Defender of the crown, #Thexder, #Arkanoid and the #LucasArts premiere, Maniac Mansion showed off what the PC could do. Have a look at this trip down memory lane and see the top ten DOS games of 1987!

ST506 Drive ‘Find’

Posted on by ajross

I recently took ownership of a banged-up old #IBM PC XT. The motherboard was toast, the case was all banged up, so I decided it wasn’t worth repairing after many hours wasted with a multimeter and desoldering.. I put a new old 10MHz Turbo XT clone board in and it complained about some boot issues. So whilst I was debugging the issue, I thought I’d put the #ST506 hard drive in from the old machine. I didn’t expect it to work, but I thought just having a controller in there might help the issue. What I didn’t expect is that the 25+ year old drive would actually work. To my amazement, it (almost) worked first time. And here’s the treasure trove on it. Always find it amazing just seeing what people leave behind on their computers. It’s like a time capsule. Apologies for the really rough video, I shot it on my phone with no mic or anything, I just recorded it live as it was happening as I didn’t know if the disk was going to crap out on me. Didn’t have time to prep

Cleaning Retro Kit

Posted on by ajross

Well, I got a mouse today. A lovely little original serial port #Microsoft mouse. It was pretty grubby, so I decided to give it a good old clean up.

Here is a video of the process and materials of what I use to clean up my retro stuff. I hope you find it entertaining and educational. I certainly found doing it a little more entertaining than it should be (thanks, Cussons!).

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