Female IEC connectors on ATX power supplies

That would require 3 256K memory cards taking up 3/5 of the slots...

In the computers I owned in those days (not a PC), I usually modified the board to take the next higher size of chips (e.g. modified my TRS-80 that supported 4K and 16K chips to take 64K chips), and/or used piggybacking to put twice as many chips on the board.

By the time I built my first IBM-compatible PC, memory was already in SIMMs and I got 16MB of RAM. That is because I waited for a decent affordable multitasking OS to appear for the PC.

Early '90s, actually. I had this bin full of old cards, and used to build instruments that talked over PC parallel ports. I sort of liked it that way--using a 16-bit IOPL DLL, I could do direct port I/O from user code in 32-bit OS/2. I only had to write the DLL code once, and used it for years, until I switched entirely to Linux about 2008.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Nope. Two (not even full). The AST sixpack was 384K. I added an expansion unit later.

That was easy on the XT but not so much on the 5150.

My brother made good use of Desqview in his business on his PC-1. Mine was just a toy so didn't bother with multitasking until OS/2 V2.

I used to really like QEMM/Desqview. Mostly I used WordPerfect 5.1+ and Fre elance 4.0 to write stuff on,and MYTE (Migratable Yorktown Terminal Emulato r) to talk to the YKTVMV VM/CMS system where I did most other computerish t hings. All in like 8MB of memory.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

At work we worked on Unix microsystems and the first PC use was XENIX-86 on the PC XT. However, it wasn't until the PC AT with XENIX-286 and later the Compaq Deskpro with XENIX-386 before it became really usable. These were expensive systems, though.

For hobby project I supported Desqview used by others, but I built a

486 PC clone myself only in december 1992 and installed Linux, the all new free Unix by Linus Torvalds. By that time, it was already running the X window system and the TCP/IP network stack, something we never had on XENIX. (those systems at work used multiport serial cards and character terminals)

At that time, at work we had a DEC VAX running VMS, which also had TCP/IP ethernet, but with monochrome X terminals. I once took my PC to work to see if that would connect to it (no internet at that time to try it from home!), and indeed I had X in color without problem. Everyone was very impressed.