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Aucbvax.6320 fa.works utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works Fri Feb 26 13:57:47 1982 IBM PC comments >From ROSSID@WHARTON-10 Fri Feb 26 13:51:07 1982 To make a couple of corrections -> 1) In point of fact, the chip is an 8088, 16 bit registers and 8 bit data paths. Some benchmarks has suggested this is the worst of both worlds -> it doesn't necessarily perform loads better than a Z-80. It may some day be possible to attatch (officially that is) an 8087 FP processor to it (the slot seems to be there) and speed things up some more.

2) It does not have CP/M at this time... it runs IBM DOS. Digital Research is working on CP/M for the PC, and IBM will be the distri- butor when that occurs. For the time being, there is VERY LITTLE software available for DOS. There are lots of people whuggest that most PC users will run DOS, not CP/M, under the theory that there is this certain mentality of an IBM buyer, and that DOS will probably be the vanilla OS version, and costs about $40, not $140.

3) A friend of mine who is admittedly somewhat biased says the Apple III has the PC beat. I can discuss his opinions at length, but I would appreciate some other opinions too.

4) So far, the famed IBM support of bugs has consisted of a "thank you for sharing that problem with us...and then they send the bug report off to the company that made the software (Lifeboat, Peachtree, VisiCorp, MicroSoft, etc. [admittedly not lightweights!])."

6) There really is not much room to grow! You only get 5 slots in the back, and the following take up space: a. Memory after the first 64K takes up 1 slot per additional 64K b. Dist drive adapter c. Asynchronous Communications Adapter d. Monocrome Display and printer Adapter e. Color/Graphics Monitor Adapter f. Printer Adapter g. Game Control Adapter

So, say we are running IBM Pascal (req 128K or 1 slot), with a color graphics game using paddles (1 for color monitor, 1 for paddles) with printer and disk drive (1 each) we have now take up all the slots. If we want to also use the system as a terminal we have to remove something. What all this means (and IBM admits the problem, my info comes from some IBM internal use only documents) is that 5 slots is enough for any given application, but you may have to open the back many times if you switch applications.

-Dave

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