Talk:IBM Personal Computer

hhoollllaa <3 melissa was here ...

{way of booting from floppy or hard disks. The versions of BASIC on the DOS disks (BASIC and BASICA) did not support the cassette. IBM did not offer an 'official' cassette deck, any third party one with the correct connector (common with computers of the time) could be used. Howard81 16:13, 26 June 2007 (GMT)

That DIN connector was not just used with computers' cassette drives of the time, it was common with audio cassette players. IBM anticipated that many people would buy their model 5150 in its cheapest configuration (no floppy drives, no monitor) and connect their preexisting regular cassette players and TV sets. That's not what happened, however. 86.56.41.93 (talk) 04:58, 17 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A late addition - I recall using the MOTOR() command in GWBASIC (or was it BASICA? 20+ years ago...) under a later version of MS DOS - booted from a Hard Card 10 Meg disk - so I think that some diskette-based versions of BASIC still supported the cassette port. I always thought of that as IBM's attention to backward compatibility - how else would you get casxssette programs onto a disk machine? --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:55, 11 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The PC BIOS contained some special routines for handling the cassette. Programmers called INT 15h, function 00h and 01h to turn the cassette motor on and off resepectively. INT 15h, function 02h was used to read data and 03h was used to write data. (Source: MS-DOS encyclopedia) Retron (talk) 13:18, 11 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Objectionable renaming

Could we put the article back where it was? The suffix "original" is unnecessary, the original article title was perfectly un-ambiguous. --Wtshymanski 21:41, 11 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

KB / KiB Edit War

This is from WP:MOSNUM

"The use of the new binary prefix standards in the Wikipedia is not required, but is recommended… " "If a contributor changes an article's usage from kilo- etc. to kibi- etc. where the units are in fact binary, that change should be accepted."

It appears that you have to be a contributor to the article to have any say in this choice. A "Drive By" editor can not make the decision. SWTPC6800 00:18, 30 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is clearly a matter of momentous importance and worth fighting a major editwar over. Drutt 08:17, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What a nice article. Pity about the kibibytes, though. --Wtshymanski 17:44, 14 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

IBM 5100

Wasn't affordable and thus not a Personal computer. Also it's hardware and the 5150 were not related and the 5150 was a totally new design from the 5100. Alatari (talk) 17:19, 18 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It was a personal computer in the sense that you didn't need to go through a professional staff of operators to use it - remember, 1975 was *very* different from 2008! "Affordable" is a relative term...in 1975 your department head might not have been able to wrangle more time on the company's mainframe, but could afford $20,000 or so to get your very own 5100 that didn't need to be run through the corporate data center. --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:41, 18 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Historically, personal computer and personal computing has been in regards to a computer designed for single person or personal use and direct interaction, as opposed to a mainframe or mini and timesharing environments. Likewise as Wtshymanski said, such systems would not require a staff to operate, including submission of materials for programming (i.e. punch cards to a staff who then puts it in to a card reader). The definition of a personal computer has never revolved around afforadability - only usability. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 21:19, 18 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Right. I get the impression many Wiki editors have never had to use a keypunch and stand in line to submit their decks. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:40, 19 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Note on the Keyboard

Imho the article fails to take notice of the problems which arose by using the IBM standard keyboard in non-English countries which naturally used letters which were not available on the English-only standard keyboard (remapping of keys with TSRs).

I hope that someone can enhance the article with that. Unfortunately I'm not an expert in this field, so I won't dare.

Alrik Fassbauer (talk) 16:41, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Font

Was there any specific name given to the font? If so is it used today? Was it like times new roman or arial or sans serif? That's pretty important since I'm assuming there was only one font. 69.251.82.213 (talk) 18:39, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The exact font depended on which video card was used; the monochrome display adapter had more pixels in each character cell than the Color Graphics Adapter. A Hercules card could display a lot of different fonts using software. I don't recall the font having a name. It was never used for printing, only for the screen display - dot-matrix impact printers of the era had their own wretched caricatures of fonts. --Wtshymanski (talk) 21:48, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Monitor

This is a forum thread, but maybe this info, particularly the info at post number 4 and 5, could be incorporated into the article? 86.56.122.190 (talk) 08:42, 22 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]