On Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 9:32 AM Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 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 5ΒΌ" 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... > > -- > I delivered in a truck to the set up in Quebec the 20 IBM XTs that you see in the movie Xmen the Apocalypse. I retrieved them after the filming. I could set up an office or classroom of XTs. A funny if not impractical practical joke B >