It's amazing how one forgets details that were once indelibly etched into the brain. Did the bus go to 16-bit on the XT? I thought that happened on the AT?

I'd always been led to believe that the Winchester handle came about from the famous rifle and IBM's code for the hard drive, but I'm not sure whether that code had any relationship to sectors/capacity.

Quote

Hey, was that 6800 / 6502 CPU a Motorolla IC??? [class 6xxx]
Just curious.
The 6800 is Motorola. 6502 was Rockwell, if I recall correctly.

Bill,
Most BASICs of the time had PEEK and POKE, but the Acorn BASIC implemented in the Atom and the BBC Micro I mentioned used really neat ? and ! operators to address a byte or a 16-bit word. It took a bit of getting used to at first, because many other BASICs used "?" as an abbreviation for PRINT.

One piece of hardware I really wish I'd kept was a big Triumph-Adler daisywheel printer. It weighed a ton (well, probably about 40 lb.) and was slow, but the print quality was fantastic.

As the subject of keyboards has been mentioned, does anyone else find that the PC keyboard has developed more than a few quirks over its development?

Look at the original PC keyboard, and the CTRL key is in the correct place, to the left of "A". It was still there on the first AT keyboards, so why did somebody decide to move it? (I have a neat TSR which hooks the keyboard interrupt and swaps CTRL and Caps Lock.) Similarly, who decided to move ESCAPE up away from the main key area? I grew up always expecting it to be immediately to the left of "1." (The first AT keyboard even had Esc on the right with the numeric pad!)

The original PC keyboard also adopted the annoying layout of having "\" between left Shift and "Z". For some strange reason, it is still there on modern British PC keyboards even though it was moved back to a more sensible place on American versions. I use a U.S. keyboard normally, but if I have to use somebody else's (British) keyboard here, I'm forever hitting \ or | by mistake.



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 07-01-2002).]