J W Fuller wrote: > > You wrote "I'm hoping to dig out my old XT and get it > running properly again." > > Is that what you call my 286 IBM? I get XT and AT confused. The XT had only the 8-bit slots. The AT introduced the 16 bit, half again longer. but didnt they both run off a 286? It's been a long time aint it.
The first keyboard I put my fingers on punched 6 bits in paper tape to a PDP-9 with 4k of RAM. It taught me to appreciate the beauty of elegant handwired assembly, an art nowadays that is somewhat dated. But sitting down with my own XT and 1 meg of DRAM felt like playing god. It got a lot of us online. I dont think anything will ultimately prove more important to the flow of history since the invention of this tool, which began putting your words on this screen just as we still see them. ASCII. All the hype these days is about the eye candy, and while I have appreciated the art of video, the art of expressing ideas is still best what it has been since the Greeks began writing them down... as text. And for that, all you need is an XT. The BBS networks began on the XT, when guys put a pc in the basement to leave online 24/7. But unlike the internet system administrators, the BBS sysop *lived* with his machine. Sooo- he didnt need a password to service his host. He couldnt just sit down at a keyboard anywhere, and access his server to monkey around with it. But then- *neither can anyone else*. If you want to hack into a BBS host, you havta break into the guys house. There is a substially more robust security issue in the BBS hosting. It didnt matter what kind of a software probe any hacker saboteur came up with somewhere else in the world- there was no access thru the com port to the DOS system kernel. Besides which, the PC could be booted off a floppy that is write protected. No sabotage software can get by this old fashioned read/write switch built into the drive. If you can get an XT running, you will have a pc no matter what kind of sabotage crap spreads on the net. BTW: you dont even need AC power! You can use a 12v and a 6volt vehicle batteries. Hook the negatives of both batteries togather, then to the black wires of the P-8, P-9 power jacks. Then hook the +12volt to the yellow wire. Now- take a diode out of a 12v car alternator. hook the diode up to the +6volt battery, and when you feed that to the red wires of the power jack, they'll only see 5.3volts. (the diode soaks up .7 volt) The XT will boot. You dont need the -5 or -12 volts unless you plan to run a modem; some comport stuff uses op-amps that need the negative bias. But the drives wont care. There are 12volt monitors, and 12volt portable TVs and NTSC video outputs. If the AC power went out, the phone system usually has enough battery power to run a few weeks. If you have the XT, and want to get back online, (I've done this with 486 too) you can get the -5v -12 bias from flashlite batteries. The amount of power needed is less than 50ma, so they'll last longer than the Lead Acids. Most of the mini size boards run on 18-20 watts. total. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
