From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Dan Olson Subject: Re: Filesystem creation Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 16:48:48 -0700 (PDT) Sender: linux-8086-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <20020514163659.I77017-100000@agora.rdrop.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: In-Reply-To: List-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Linux 8086 > The problem with your quote above is quite a simple one - the original > IBM PC didn't scan for adapter BIOSes, so was VERY limited in what > expansion one could add to it. That was an oversight by IBM's engineers > as they provided the slots for plugging in expansion cards, but forgot > to allow for BIOS support for those expansions. The BIOS included the > ability to boot from floppies as standard, but that was about all. > > This was the original version of the original IBM PC, with a fixed 16k > of RAM that couldn't be expanded on the motherboard. Ah! Okay, I've never seen such a machine, they were very short-lived. Maybe someday I'll find one. > This is the one I mis-labelled - this is the revised original PC, where > the RAM could be expanded from the supplied 16k up to 64k, and NOT the > PC/XT as I originally labelled it. Yes, I had one, and I paid the extra > for the floppy drive. Okay, that makes sence now, the floppy was definetly an option in those machines. > This is where Bill Gates made his famous "Nobody will want more than > 64k" comment - see below for his later comment. I forget the exact story, but I think he's the one who pushed IBM into making the PC a 64-256k machine, as the original 16k was too limiting. Of course sticking adaptor ROMs at the 640k-1M range was done because 640K was way more memory than anybody could use! :) > 3a. The "revised IBM PC/XT" was the original IBM PC/XT with the > onboard RAM capacity upgraded to 640k when the clones were all > offering 512k on the motherboard. The clones promptly followed > and allowed 640k as well. Okay, that's what my board is, I was wondering if it was a true IBM offering as all the documentation I have mentions the board having a smaller capacity. Turns out there's a jumper on the board that selects which type of system you have...ie it determines the amount of memory the DIP switch settings give you. > > And it ran at a whopping 6MHz too :) > > Exactly the same as the PC/XT-286 that preceded it. I liked the "standard > extras" phraseology myself... That's great...then again, they were probably impressive compaired to some of the other clones of the day, with the 16 bit ISA bus and all. > > 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 :). > > Could you advise what the problem is with doing that? The various Linux > distributions all supply rawrite.exe which can write the image out to > floppy under MS-DOS so the procedure isn't hard. I guess that wasn't too clear, it hard simply because I'm always doing something else, it would be much easier if I took an hour and sat down in front of the computer and made the disk, then gave it a try. It's also hard because I'm sharing one desk/monitor between three PCs :) > We would all love that. However, according to Alan Cox, BCC is slightly > too large and as a result won't compile itself, although the assembler > and linker both compile fine to run under ELKS. > > There's one or two tweaks I would like to see done to BCC anyway, so I > may soon be looking into this and seeing if I can get bcc to compile > itself. No promises though... Well, compiling itself is definetly a good thing, but even if we could compile a binary on a different machine, then stick it on an ELKS disk image or something, that'd be all I'd want. I'm just interested in writing a couple short programs on the ELKS machine, then compiling them locally. Is that a difficult task? I have no idea what it'd take to get a compiler running under ELKS. Dan