25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer" 4221

Philip Homburg

Our IBM PCs in 1982 came bundled with a "word processor" called PC-Write. I stuck a diskette in A and it tried to write to B, said I had put my disk in the wrong slot, did I wish to switch to B? If I moved it to B and answered Yes, it tried writing to A, and issued the same message again. I wondered how such a thing could possibly have been shipped. But the managers were all ga-ga over it 'cuz it said "Idiot, Buy Me" on the front.

I couldn't believe the way they screwed up the interrupt buttignments.

Hercules rocked. Fast, furious, steady, never failed.

My alternative was a homebrew. It got real easy with an Ampro Little Board. It cost about $40 at the computer show, something similar for a floppy drive, about $15 for a power supply, $12 for a Bud box, and all that was left was a VT100 terminal which I found at the swap meet. In most places a swap meet you find Mexican jewelry and car parts, in Silicon Valley you found new and used computer stuff. This guy had a table full of terminals and I picked out a VT100 compatible. "Is there a manual?" I asked. He looked blank, didn't speak English all that well. I tried to simplify... "Is there a book for this?" The guy brightened right up. "Buuks, yes, uh huh, I got zee buuks right up here." He had a lot of boxes piled on top of his station wagon and after some fumbling pulled one down and handed it over. I opened it up, but there was no books or book inside. "What the hey, what about a book? Do you have the book or not?" The guy looked at me like I was stoned. "You are holding zee ***buuks*** in your hands. You puts zee terminal inside zee buuks to carry it home not broken."

I had to modify the voltage levels to get the VT100 to see the Ampro but with that it started working like a bee. I bought a copy of Turbo Pascal and it came with a text editor, so I had a heck of a lot of power with just that much of a system. Eventually I got a Hercules to put in it, and I had a dual monitor system. I could put the program output on the standard screen and step thru the code on the Hercules monochrome.

It was no strange mix at all. Ever squint at the schematics that they printed in the PC technical manual? It was a good straightforward build of the design implied by the 8088 architecture. IBM could not have done it. Too heavy in management and too weak in sense. Those schematics there were hand drawn. It was built in somebody's garage and IBM bought them out. That's all they were capable of. I know, I had a professor that spent 30 years at IBM and he was One of Them. IBM had CAD systems to draw schematics on well before '82, but by some brilliant management decision, they denied this resource to what became their main and only profit in a few years.

I think the clever arrangement in the cast iron box was theirs tho. It was badly done. Things inside were not bolted to a modular frame, they were hung on each other, with chromed sheet metal flashing that didn't fit.

It was the boost PC-DOS and then MS-DOS got from corporate America. Drop everything, we're going with the stock market winner which is winning because we're going with it. It's a servo system tracking on its own error term.

Wood