On Sat, 21 Jan 2023, Chris via cctalk wrote:
I have an xt mobo and some portion is populated w/NEC 4116 or 4164 chips
(but 4116s were specific to the 5150, no? It's not in front of me).
There are a bunch on the board, not sure if it's all the ram. Was this
typical (I'm sure that wasn't the case). Is this an example of an early
5160? Why did they goldnplate the covers?
The first 5150 was available with one row of 16K RAM, you could plug
whatever you had (such as from Godbout) into the other 3 rows, and almost
anything was cheaper than IBM's prices.
I think that the early 5160 also used 16K RAM, but I don't know if you
could buy one without all 4 rows populated.
Then 5160 was available that could use 64K RAM chips, and/or, with a
trivial mod could use two rows of 256K chips, plus two rows of 64K chips.
Anybody remember the full details?
Why not gold-plate? Gold was under $200 an ounce fora while, and the
thickness was thin.
