The IBM PC XT
I got an IBM PC XT around 1985. A lot of us at IBM were
getting XT's to log on to our office systems from home.
Of course then the office system was a big mainframe host, and
we logged on with PROFS, one of the earliest, and still one of
the best e-mail systems (remember Ollie North in the White
House and the deleted PROFS notes that DID NOT disappear?).
In those days, e-mail at home was an incredible
productivity enhancement. My team and I could send
PROFS notes any time, including nights and weekends. It seemed
that the whole pace of business accelerated an order of magnitude
when we got this capability.
Graphics
This particular XT was my first machine with a hard drive.
It's a 10MB drive, which seemed like all the room in the world at
the time. (And I'm crowding 1.2G on my laptop today.) It came
with 128K of memory, which I upgraded to 512K so I could run
some basic office apps; IBM had the Assistant
Series - Writing Assistant, Graphing Assistant - my first intro
to graphics... a far cry from today's Freelance Graphics. But
the XT was my first system that had graphics capability,
and I wrote Basic routines like crazy to draw circles,
use exotic colors, and even create fractal images, which had just
come to public attention at the time.
PC XT in the Nineties?!!!
My PC XT still runs just fine. The graphics look pretty good,
even for today, and overall it's a very solid machine. Maybe
someone will figure out how to retrofit a Web browser for DOS 2.0!
If you have stories or pictures to share, please write
me at denichols@ridgefield-ct.com.
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