Did anyone here have IBM personal computer in the 80s and 90s?

[whitby]

Yes I had a PC XT with its 10MB hard disk and a single 360 KB floppy and 128KB RAM which I later expanded to 640 KB by clearing the through hole plated holes on the circuit board, inserting sockets and inserting the chips. I later bought a PCAT clone chassis with just the motherboard with the 80286 processor running at 6 MHz and a 5.25” 1.2 MB floppy drive from a little known company in Austin called Dell! Started me on a whole journey of building machines until I built my last one in 2017! Interesting days.

 

[Nermal]

5.25” 1.2 MB floppy drive

Those things still give me PTSD.

 

[cjsuk]

Fun story. UK here. My father bought an IBM PC when they first came out so he could develop some software to run bus garages in London. The IBM PCs were so expensive that they ate into the software cost significantly. So he started a small import business for third party peripherals and clone parts from Taiwan and assembled PCs in a small industrial unit. It got to the point we had PC parts in boxes up to the ceiling at home before he did that. At one point in the late 80s he was shipping as many computers in the UK as Dell were in the US.

Unfortunately he had the business brains of a monkey and managed to hose the company entirely by 1992 and spent the rest of his life running a little MSP selling Compaq/HPE stuff.

I went off to electrical engineering as I was more interested in the hardware...

 

[whitby]

Those things still give me PTSD.

Yes, they were remarkably unreliable. You could never trust them to store data or even boot from, luckily those huge 10MB hard disks saved us… 😂

 

[Bubble99]

There were high hopes for Windows running on PowerPC but MS never went through with it. (The modern equivalent is MS certifying ARM Windows to run on Apple Silicon via Parallels).

My first Mac, the Power Mac 7200/75, had an IBM-made PowerPC processor. So far I've had IBM, Motorola and Intel chips in my Macs and am looking forward to my first Apple Silicon in the next couple of years.

Side note: When IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo and Apple moved to Intel, Apple was ironically making "IBM compatibles" while IBM wasn't!

But powerPC where head of its time and better than Intel.

 

[WebHead]

But powerPC where head of its time and better than Intel.

True, I guess MS considered it a threat. Once again the better technology finished last.

 

[Bkxmnr]

The company I worked for in the 80's had an IBM PCjr. I used Lotus123 to track my investments for my finance class in college. I remember thinking the color monitor was wicked cool. All 16 colors LOL.

 

[Silencio]

My father had an original IBM PC at work. He eagerly anticipated the release of the PCjr for home, but when we went to see it in person at the local Computerland. We both saw pretty clearly that it was a dud. I talked him into buying an Apple //e instead, and the rest is history.