The 1st 'Affordable' Almost IBM PC Compatible | Nostalgia Nerd

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Lumix G6 with Vario 14-42mm Lens
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[Nostalgianerd]

If you're interested in find more about this era of PCs, you might find these videos compelling;

[williamsudbrink]

Funny to hear that old article read out loud. I was in college when I wrote it.

[JPBennett]

I know it's been said, but it's really cool that there are a group of you guys that are friendly and work together on videos, lending voice-over work, etc.

[TombstoneChris]

It's always nice to hear LGR. I love it when you two guys work together. Great video.

[petrolhead]

Really appreciate the effort that you put into the captions (Soothing stroking sounds 😂). I hate watching auto-generated ones, nice to know that hard of hearing/deaf viewers aren't being left behind.

[nottiification]

Wordstar was my moms favorite word processor. She was so attached to it that i was tasked with getting it working on all new family computers every time we upgraded. I didnt get her to give up on it until windows XP!

[dsr]

My dad spent the dough to get an IBM PC, and I remember how much he'd later spend on RAM (and I think he had a 20 or 40MB "Winchester" drive). At least he'd continue to use it for a whole decade! He only upgraded (to a then decked out Gateway 486 EISA SCSI tower) when color multimedia was prevalent. I also remember all the sets of manuals he got with the hardware and software (pretty classy with set fonts and pastel colors)....way different then today (where there is no documentation included unless you want to download something off the internet).

[multigerbs]

A lot of clones back in the day used a Hercules graphic adapter as an upgrade from CGA. It was only mono chrome but gave a higher resolution that was useful for business. There were even emulators that would allow you to play games that utilised CGA on the Hercules board.

[askhowiknow]

I can't believe you got a hold of Bill Sudbrink. He also sounds a lot like LGR

[KomradeMikhail]

While discussing PC clones running MS-DOS that were not truly "IBM PC Compatible", you forgot to mention the _Holy_ _Trinity_ ...
Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and Flight Simulator.
Which were often used as the standard to test if a clone was "compatible" enough.

WordStar and CalcStar are just not going to get productivity done at the same level.

[MegaManNeo]

I love how the computer case looks like your typical HiFi equipment of that era, as well as the keyboard sharing its color scheme with MSX's 🤓

But I wonder, what do you do if those floppies die with the BIOS bootsector on it? 😕

[chainedlupine]

A bit of a correction. It wasn't that DOS and BIOS couldn't handle text functionality such as cursors, but that you needed to use BIOS routines to do anything other than just read/write from STDIN/STDOUT (ie: interfacing with your computer like its a terminal program). The BIOS routines (int 10h to be exact) could move the cursor, change its type (blinking or underline), scroll part of the text up/down, change colors, etc. But people didn't like to use the BIOS routines because they were slow. Like, really slow.


For example, the original IBM 5150 had their original CGA card which could not share the video RAM with the CPU if it was reading text for video output -- if you tried to write to it during anything but vertical blank, it would cause random garbage to appear. (Called "snow" at the time.) The BIOS routines (as implemented by IBM) would always wait for vertical blank to change any video memory, so this made them rather slow. Particularly when clone hardware started to appear which fixed the CGA card's hardware problem and did need the so-called "snow fix." Therefore, writing directly to video memory was possible, and this made text functions a lot faster.


At that point it was kinda impossible to shove developers back into the INT 21h/10h box for total %100 cross-system platform and the rest is history.


A side note: This is why before we got 386 systems and true virtual hardware access, using DOS apps in Windows 1.0/2.0/286/etc was not very useful -- a DOS program could only use the INT 21h/10h functions to draw text/get keyboard input and be displayed in a window, otherwise Windows had to "shell out" and give the program full access to everything in full-screen mode (taking up critical low-memory). If you used Windows 3.0/3.1, you might remember there still being a shell-out mode for DOS programs in case they did really funky hardware stuff that might clobber Windows 3.x's own stuff. :)

[aspectcarl]

Ah I actually owned this model of Sanyo pc, what memories this brings back. My first pc and my brother and built a serial port on veroboard. It was a disappointing computer because of its compatibility, but we learnt loads on this machine ❤️

[lsg]

I was waiting for NN and LGR cross-over episode and I kinda get it

[JDStone]

Awesome video, great research! The first IBM PC Compatibles I was able to use at home was my sisters Leading Edge PC and my fathers Victor VPCII PC. This was in 1985-86. My first experience at all with IBM PC's was my friends parents business, they had an original IBM 5150 with a 20MB HD and CGA graphics, this was in '83-84.

[TedSeeber]

The 95% compatible I remember correctly. Had a friend with one of these. He *upgraded* to a Commodore 128.

[alaindavid]

The clock - disk provlem was due to a reverse mounted capacitor. You could fix it or mount a new battery backed clock. Loads of things were produced so you could write any format of disk and read all sorts of cpm and msdos disks

[bloodyl_uk]

Yay.... Nostalgia Nerd, LGR and a Sanyo MBC 550, the very thing I've been waiting to see, the 550 brings back so many memories.

[BruceEverett]

Oh man. My first PC. I couldn't get a replacement disk with the bios on it, so in the bin it went in 1992. *Sigh*

And those red-striped silver disk holders. I wouldn't have expected they'd seem so familiar, but seeing them again feels like I saw them yesterday.

Thanks heaps.

[gadgetman_nz]

One of these was my intro to the 'PC'. I was working at a TV company in '84 and they traded the 555 for a TV but didn't know what to do with it.. I managed to trim down the DOS to just what was required and used Datastar and Reportstar to set up a computer system for keeping track of rentals. Each week they'd add/remove rentals and run a report that would print out new invoices and give a report on who to chase up. In the process it moved from the A drive to the B drive, effectively giving a backup, with the new weeks status in the B drive and last weeks in the A drive. It started my IT career, which is still going today.