Re: Filesystem creation

Dan Olson
2002-05-14T00:19:59Z

> To be accurate...
>
> 1. The original IBM PC was supplied with a CASSETTE drive as
> standard. 160k floppies were a very expensive optional extra
> as you had to buy not only the drive, but also an interface
> card and an operating system to boot from them, all sold as
> separate items. Hard drives were NOT supported, and it was
> not possible to add support for them as the BIOS didn't have
> the ability to hook extensions in.

Sure it is, what are you talking about? It wasn't until the AT was
introduced that hard drives were BIOS supported. Before that, the
controller card had it's own BIOS on it, and the system BIOS just scanned
for adaptor BIOSes before trying to boot. I've used both MFM and SCSI in
origional PCs.

> 2. The original IBM PC/XT was supplied with a "new upgraded" 180k
> floppy drive as standard, and as an option, these could be
> replaced with a 360k drive for an extra £275. I remember paying
> the extra when this wmachine was top of the range.

I thought single sided drives were only offered in the origional PC....the
real old ones that only had 16-64K of RAM optional. Don't know for sure
on that one though I guess.

> 3. The "Revised" IBM PC/XT was supplied with dual 360k floppies
> as standard, and one of them could be replaced with an MFM
> hard drive - originally 5M in capacity, but those were replaced
> with 10M ones within a month, and the MFM interface was replaced
> with an RLL one about a month later to increase the capacity.

Yup, the "eXtended Technology" :)

> 4. The IBM PC/AT was supplied with a 20M hard drive as standard,
> as well as the 286 processor and various other "standard extras"
> as IBM referred to them.

And it ran at a whopping 6MHz too :)

> > I've got an 8086 based PS/2, a 25 I believe.
>
> That agrees with IBM's website.

Good, then I'm actually remembering something right today!

> If you still have it handy, could you try the latest images out and see
> whether it works now. If not, would you be willing to help explore why
> it doesn't work so we can fix the problem?

Well, it's not handy, but I still have it. If I stumble across it I'll
grab it and see if it works or not. I'm having a hard enough time just
getting a boot disk made and installed in my IBM XT (eXtended Technology
:). You know, it's a little off the subject, but what would really be
handy is a little C compiler that ran under ELKS. It wouldn't need to be
able to compile the OS, just something we could use to write little
programs. Just a thought, it would give me a little motivation to use the
OS anyway :)

Dan

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