Comments on: Fifteen Classic PC Design Mistakes

By: John

John — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:27:03 +0000

Western Auto sold them here back in the early 80's until the machine was discontinued. J&R Music World also sold them at around the same time.

By: John

John — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:18:11 +0000

The TRS-80 or Tandy Color Computer 3 only had one socketed chip – all others were soldered directly to the board – but yes, it was sometimes necessary to reseat that one chip (GIME chip) if a machine ceased to function properly – we often pulled the chip and reseated it thus curing the problem – never heard of anyone dropping the CoCo 3 to reseat it – but who knows…

By: John Turner

John Turner — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:33 +0000

I believe the wireless chiclet was abandoned for a non chiclet wired keyboard due to the complaints about the original keyboard. -but I could be remembering incorrectly…

By: John Turner

John Turner — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:11:41 +0000

2.8M Floppy Drives (well, 2.88M) were used in some of IBM's MCA Systems (PS/1 or PS/2). I have some of the drives that are new – I've been meaning to hook them up and play around with them.

By: Galvo

Galvo — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:59:47 +0000

Even a small hard drive was really expensive in 1985. Especially a SCSI drive, it was possibly cheaper but much slower to buy an Amiga sidecar & put a 20M ST-506 drive in that with an Amiga partition.
I remember how glad I was to hear later that the 70M drive someone bought for their IBM clone was SCSI & any bigger hard-drives would all be SCSI.
Then another cost cutting that cost us plenty of hassles & waste. Compaq dragged PC compatibles back to PC BIOS dependant IDE alias ATA drives. We ended up with layers of disinformation and a succession of new limited standards & workarounds to get old x86 code BIOSs to believe in the smallest harddrive you could buy.

By: Galvo

Galvo — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:16:12 +0000

Then the Amiga 1000 used DB-25s for both parallel & serial, but the opposite genders to a PC so if someone used an IBM style cable they wrecked something.

By: Galvo

Galvo — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:27:34 +0000

Yes 2.8M floppy drives, I've never seen one or a floppy for them.

By: Galvo

Galvo — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:25:09 +0000

Amigas are the least bad desktop machine I've used, but possibly they wouldn't have existed if IBM PC had used 68000s. Who knows?

(I saw an Amiga X1000 motherboard recently, should see it working next week)

By: Galvo

Galvo — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:18:22 +0000

I agree 100% about the sucking fan but I also think hot power supplies & dangerous voltages shouldn't be in the main case anyway. However reviewers always complained when a computer had an external power supply. But large plugpacks that were supposed to go straight on the outlet were a pain! At least now most of us have power boards.

By: Galvo

Galvo — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:00:39 +0000

Also Radio Shack Color Computer 3 I was told.