On Wed, 26 Aug 2020 at 15:10, Bill Degnan <billdeg...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I remember when the IBM XT was too new for a VCF exhibit, back when Sellam > ran shows.
I can believe that. I gutted 2 original working PC-ATs in about 1996 for cases for Pentium-class machines. I deeply regret it now but it was 25y ago -- they were only about 10y old and not remotely collectable or even very interesting at the time. I still have 2 MDA cards and one screen from them. > The perspective is of a person who was not really part of the XT class > machine world when they were > pervasive. To me he seems to be exploring how they work as he teaches his > son, but I guess most people > forget at this point how to use a PC and DOS. Exactly, yes. The PC came out nearly _forty years ago_ now, and only middle-aged types like myself (52!) remember them when they were new. I didn't see one until Uni in 1985, when I was 17. Working adult IT professionals in their mid-twenties to early 30s today grew up only with multicore 64-bit machines and have quite possibly only used SSD-equipped machines at work. Most have never seen or used a floppy diskette or CD-ROM, and machines with ISA slots and optical drives disappeared when they were small children. They might never have seen or used any kind of rotating or magnetic media whatsoever. Some I have personally encountered have never used a wired network connection. The era of 16-bit machines with rotating 5¼" media (floppy, hard or optical) that you can _hear_ turning, that take time to get up to speed, where as you wait a minute or two for it to creak into life you can _hear_ motors whirring up, is as unknown to them as spinning the thread to make their own garments. For me, who started out at work on a PC-AT and worked on PC-XTs, it's a smooth continuum, but it's easy to forget that it really hasn't been, and the days of text-only single-tasking command-line machines with moving parts are last century... -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
