Just for fun

[Thorny]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:43:35 -0600, Karl Larsen wrote:

>     Steve did you have REAL 360K floppies? That was later for me. I had
> a genuine copy of an IBM Personal Computer from Japan with a mysterious
> Phoenix BIOS, whatever that was :-)
> 
>     It had 2 floppy drives with 64K byte of RAM. The operating system
> was on one floppy and the work was on the other. It was a REAL Powerhouse!
> 
> Karl

Sounds like an IBM XT clone, I still have one of those too but wasn't
it 640K RAM? I also have the next model an AT, which has a
harddrive as well as those two FDDs. And a 386, and a 486, and some
assorted P1s. I keep telling myself I'm going to set them all up again
some day, but I imagine I will expire first, I haven't even started
on that project since retiring.

Anybody else ever have a Sinclair Z-80? It had a whole 1K RAM and BASIC
was built-in in ROM and it loaded programs from a tape drive (voice tape
drive with a data quality tape). Video was composite to a TV. It was
common for it to take several restarts for the tape to be correctly read.
It's where I started to learn to program in BASIC, was an affordable
little box which was capable of holding my attempts at "Hello world" Price
was around $100 USD, or maybe a little bit more, I shudder to think what
that would be in today's dollars.