Re: Filesystem creation

Riley Williams
2002-05-14T06:54:26Z

Hi Alan.

>> 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.

> It would be nice to find someone with an XT with 512-640K of RAM and
> the casette drive, if only for an excuse to add /dev/tape 8)

We could easily add that anyway, and label it as EXPERIMENTAL until
somebody with such a machine turns up to test it. After all, the BIOS
routines for that are fairly well documented.

>> replaced with a 360k drive for an extra GBP 275. I remember paying
>> the extra when this wmachine was top of the range.

> Youch. I'd forgotton how big those prices were at the time

My first hard drive (a 20M one) cost me nearly GBR 850 at the time, and
the 60G one I recently bought cost me GBP 95 by comparison.

Best wishes from Riley.