[rescue] AT&T 3b1 Starlan software

[Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 01:44:00PM -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
> 
> > I am sorry but if you compare the IBM PC to today's architectures, of
> > course it is not competitive. But as usual you have to see the PC when it
> > was first introduced, it was actually a pretty good machine.
> 
> Bullshit.  It was broken-as-designed.  It was a design requirement that
> it be suitably stripped-down so as not to steal the thunder from IBM's
> bigger iron.  This was instrumental in their choice of the Intel 8088
> over the more capable Motorola 68000.

As well, they built it from off-the-shelf parts because they didn't
want to spend any money on a prototype that the suits at HQ thought
was yet another science project.

> > scalable storage... what a concept!
> 
> Yeah, you could choose one or two single-sided floppy drives.  Woo!  You
> didn't get a choice of fixed discs until DOS 2.0, IIRC, and I still
> don't know if the original PC was capable of -booting- from a hard drive
> without a BIOS replacement.

That wasn't even the worst of it.  When they did have drives, they had
a known problem with some of them, which could cause data loss.  They
refused to beat on the supplier or use a different one because having
a good relationship with the supplier was more important.

--Patrick