George Washingtons Axe

Today is the 20th anniversary of my first PC. Not my first computer, just my first IBM clone PC. It was a Chendai (a long forgotten clone company in Melbourne) with all the extras; a 20 Meg Hard disk, 640 K of RAM, Intel 8088 CPU running at 4.77 Mhz, Hercules Graphics card and a green screen mono monitor. Oh, and a 5.25 inch floppy drive. No sound, no CD, no network card, no modem. It came with DOS 2.11 and it cost me the princely sum of 2810 Australian dollars. A pretty significant sum for 1985. Still a significant sum in 2005!

The interesting thing was the way the sales guy handled the software requirements. They had a rack with maybe a couple of hundred floppies and the deal was that I could, at the time of pickup, bring as many floppies as I liked and copy whatever I wanted. I had to do the copies myself. And so I stole copies of Lattice C version 2, Borlands Sidekick, Wordstar 3.3, dBase II, Lotus 123 and suchlike.

In those days computers came with paper manuals and the manuals themselves told of the times. The manuals I received included a clone copy of the IBM PC reference guide which contained a full source code listing of the BIOS and circuit diagrams for the motherboard and plug in cards. Of course the diagrams referred to the IBM XT computer and not the clone I had but strangely enough the BIOS source code was an exact match. I wonder how that happened?

For some reason I've never understood my hard disk drive was drive E: even after a reformat and reinstall it stubbornly refused to become drive C: Taught me to never hardcode the drive letter.

After my Micropolis floppy drive based system the move to one with a hard disk was an order of magnitude faster! Though I no longer remember the detail the move to MS-DOS felt like a backward move though I did like the ability to save files in a directory structure.

That was October 1985, a month before the release of Windows 1.0. I upgraded to a 40 meg voice coil hard drive in February 1989 because the pressure of keeping file usage within 20 megs finally became too much! It wasn't until sometime in late 1988 that I had accumulated as much as 13 megs of files, operating system and development environment included!

The final link with that computer was broken sometime in 1995 when the last component, the case, was replaced in an upgrade cycle. It was somewhat akin to George Washingtons axe. The same axe, just three new heads and four new handles.