Back when I was a teenager, I would have absolutely gone down a rabbit hole like the author did. From "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" to reading all the technical manuals, usenet, etc. I definitely nerded out over this stuff! Glad to see folks still take an interest.
These days, I've an acquired brain injury. Between that an old age, it was a bit hard to read, but also, just a little bit familiar, so I enjoyed it.
Now I am expecting "256 color VGA programming in C" to resurface at some point! :D
That was one option I thought of at first (mentioned in the first section), but the info I found indicated that the /370 models used the same firmware as the "plain" 5170s - if there were any BIOS extensions, they were probably somewhere on the add-on cards. The AT/370 also had 512K of on board RAM, while this BIOS seems to indicate 640K.
Back when I was a teenager, I would have absolutely gone down a rabbit hole like the author did. From "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" to reading all the technical manuals, usenet, etc. I definitely nerded out over this stuff! Glad to see folks still take an interest.
These days, I've an acquired brain injury. Between that an old age, it was a bit hard to read, but also, just a little bit familiar, so I enjoyed it.
Now I am expecting "256 color VGA programming in C" to resurface at some point! :D
Old hardware was always so much fun...
256 colors? VGA?
Bah! You kids with your newfangled graphics modes. 320 x 200 CGA and 16 colors is more than enough. See the linked "8088 MPH" video for proof: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...
> 320 x 200 CGA
with the opposite of smooth scrolling - video off during text scrolling. BLINK!
kind of like the crazy blinking ancestor of vsync off
Any chance it was for the "IBM Personal Computer AT/370" that nobody remembers (perhaps because nobody used)?
I remember that. I think it ran VM/SP or whatever it must have been called.
I recall the 370 part was on a card.
That was one option I thought of at first (mentioned in the first section), but the info I found indicated that the /370 models used the same firmware as the "plain" 5170s - if there were any BIOS extensions, they were probably somewhere on the add-on cards. The AT/370 also had 512K of on board RAM, while this BIOS seems to indicate 640K.
Excellent write-up.
Appreciated, thanks!