This & That

This & That

It’s good to look back once in a while, don’t you think?

The IBM PC was released in August of 1981 and ran on a 4.77-MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor. It came equipped with a cassette port and 16 Kbytes of memory, expandable to whopping 256 Kbytes. It had one or two single-sided 160-Kbyte floppy disk drives, but they were optional — over the $1,565 base price. A monochrome or color monitor was also optional.

A typical system with a memory of 64 Kbytes, a single diskette drive and, its own display was priced around $3,000. An expanded system for business with color graphics, two diskette drives, and a printer cost about $4,500. DOS 1.0 added $40 to the price.

Options included:

• A printer that could print in two directions at 80 characters per second in 12 different character styles, and also check itself for malfunctions and provide an out-of-paper signal.

• A color/graphics monitor with 16 foreground and background colors and 256 characters for text applications. Its graphics were in four colors.

• Multiple 32-K and 64-K memory cards that could be plugged into the option slots to increase memory to 256 Kbytes.

IBM had actually used an Intel 8085 CPU in the System/23 Datamaster, a “full-function data processing installation,” that was introduced just one month before the PC and included an 80-character-per-second printer, at a cost $9,830.

The PC/XT model came out in April of 1983 and featured a 10 Mbyte hard disk, DOS 2.0, and up to 512 Kbytes of memory on the motherboard.