IBM PC Oddities
Posted by Benj Edwards | Thursday, August 11, 2011
New Power for Your PC
When I opened up my 5150 recently, I discovered that one of its previous owners had replaced the Intel 8088 CPU with a Zilog V20 CPU. The V20, originally designed by NEC, could run certain programs 30% faster than the 8088– even at the same 4.77 MHz clock speed. It became a popular and easy upgrade.
The empty socket you see in this photo next to the V20 is for an Intel 8087 numeric co-processor. IBM included the empty socket even though the 8087 had not yet entered production at the time of the PC’s launch.
August 11th, 2011 at 8:07 pm
What about IBM's word processing software, Display Write 1.0? It's hard to find any good information on this product on the internet. I even remember the name of the executable "dw1" 🙂
August 12th, 2011 at 5:34 pm
What's bizzare and dystopian about teaching people to read? I say it's utopian. Now if they subliminally taught them to only buy IBM or become chimp plant lackeys… that would be dystopian.
October 23rd, 2011 at 9:57 pm
I think the author was just showing how limited his/her vocabulary is. …ah, if only they had access to one of those evil IBM enslavement machines during their youth.