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2024-01-30 3:08 am
I'm a retired former IT professional. I attended University and studied EE but never graduated - life got in the way. I bought an IBM PC-1 (yep it had, 1 SSSD 5-1/4" full height floppy drive, 16KB RAM on motherboard, a cassette port and an IBM green screen monitor, oh and IBM DOS 1.1) in late 1981. I had that thing playing Yankee Doodle before going to bed the first night! My first job in IT was landed because I knew dBASE II and how to write Lotus 1-2-3 macros! 27+ years later I'm done with the IT hamster wheel. It was a good run but I'm enjoying being retired. I now make things with metal, I have a lathe, vertical mill, several welders, a CNC plasma table and can make most anything I decide to. My interest in micro controllers has been sparked by a desire to help a friend who owns an old 25¢ car wash, he wants to know details of how many customers, options selected, $ spent, etc. Sounds like a good project for an Arduino, Raspberry Pi or a combination of fun things to play with.
2024-01-30 9:33 am
@inkblotr Welcome to the forum. Not sure what
SSSD 5-1/4" full height floppy drive
is, the first PC I bought had 2 5.25" floppies, no SSSD as they had not been invented yet. IIRC, each floppy at IBM prices was $700.
My wife was still an IBM Employee so we got it at a discount but I had left IBM for greener pastures a few months before the PC was announced. While there I did beta test a predecessor to the PC though, it was a 50 lb luggable!!! It was announced in 1984.
I had several other computers prior to that and the first I 'played' with was an analogue teaching tool in high school in 1959. It was a gift from Ferranti Packard Canada.
You will love the world of MCU and MPU and coding now is soooooo much easier. I started with machine language, so macro assembler was a 'high level' language.
First computer 1959. Retired from my own computer company 2004.
Hardware - Expert in 1401, and 360, fairly knowledge in PC plus numerous MPU's and MCU's
Major Languages - Machine language, 360 Macro Assembler, Intel Assembler, PL/I and PL1, Pascal, Basic, C plus numerous job control and scripting languages.
My personal scorecard is now 1 PC hardware fix (circa 1982), 1 open source fix (at age 82), and 2 zero day bugs in a major OS.
2024-01-30 1:32 pm
Welcome indeed, @inkblotr.
Ron, at a wild guess, SSSD is Single-Sided, Single-Density ... about 80 kBytes capacity, if I recall, although I only met that standard in a UK designed Z80 machine (RML) about 2 years before the IBM PC hit appeared. At that time, the actual disc could be (optionally) purchased in a 'double sided' version .. that is although the drive was single sided, the disc could be inserted either way round .. I think the disc 'case' had two holes for the disc rotation position sensor to enable it to be used on either side.
Maybe you are thinking of SSD .. Solid State Disk?
Best wishes and take care my friend, Dave
2024-01-30 2:59 pm
@davee YES, totally forgot that nomenclature. I think the original DOS 1.0 size was 160Kb and single sided.
Here is the WiKi
Floppy disks were supported on IBM's PC DOS and Microsoft's MS-DOS from their beginning on the original IBM PC. With version 1.0 of PC DOS (1981), only single-sided 160 KB floppies were supported. Version 1.1 the next year saw support expand to double-sided 320 KB disks. Finally, in 1983, DOS 2.0 supported 9 sectors per track rather than 8, providing 180 KB on a (formatted) single-sided disk and 360 KB on a double-sided.[28]
First computer 1959. Retired from my own computer company 2004.
Hardware - Expert in 1401, and 360, fairly knowledge in PC plus numerous MPU's and MCU's
Major Languages - Machine language, 360 Macro Assembler, Intel Assembler, PL/I and PL1, Pascal, Basic, C plus numerous job control and scripting languages.
My personal scorecard is now 1 PC hardware fix (circa 1982), 1 open source fix (at age 82), and 2 zero day bugs in a major OS.
2024-01-30 11:16 pm
Hi Ron @zander,
I don't doubt your answer ... I was (hopefully) remembering the earlier computer's disks, which may well have been a lower spec, as they were probably some of the first 5.25" derivatives from the then 'standard' 8" disks. Of course, they were usually used with CP/M 1.4 or 2.2.
Best wishes, Dave
2024-01-30 11:32 pm
@davee The further back in time you go the less capacity they had. Now I have a USB drive the 1/2 the size of my baby finger nail and it holds 1 Trillion bytes!
First computer 1959. Retired from my own computer company 2004.
Hardware - Expert in 1401, and 360, fairly knowledge in PC plus numerous MPU's and MCU's
Major Languages - Machine language, 360 Macro Assembler, Intel Assembler, PL/I and PL1, Pascal, Basic, C plus numerous job control and scripting languages.
My personal scorecard is now 1 PC hardware fix (circa 1982), 1 open source fix (at age 82), and 2 zero day bugs in a major OS.
DaveE reacted