Re: PC20-III

From: Christopher A Bongaarts (bong0004_at_tc.umn.edu)
Date: 2001-04-17 19:21:07

As Bryan Pope once put it so eloquently:

[Someone else said:]
> > Some centuries ago there existed PC's which had a BIOS which didn't know of
> > the existance of harddisk at all. Then came the AT with some preprogrammed
> > types. The one you mean is type 4: 620 tracks, 4 heads, 17 sectors. Those

One of the "features" of the XT over the original PC was the addition
of hard disk support to the BIOS.

(To another someone else: all PC's have BIOS, but not all have the SETUP
program in ROM.)

> But I do remember using SETUP from a floppy.  But I always thought what a 
> *bad* idea it was to setup your computer with a disk.  Unless that disk was 
> nailed to the computer, the next time you wanted to change something you 
> would have to spend have the day looking for the floppy to do a change that 
> would only take five minutes.

On the upside, the layout of the CMOS RAM area is pretty standard, so
a "generic" SETUP program should be able to do simple setup on most
PC's, or you could write your own without too much effort.  I think
the basic 46 or so HD types are also reasonably standardized (from the 
AT on, anyway).

But as noted elsewhere, the specific problem here appears to be 8 bit
vs. 16 bit IDE interfaces on the Commodore PC's.

%% Chris Bongaarts    %% bong0004@tc.umn.edu  %% http://umn.edu/~cab
%% Univ of Minnesota  %% CBongo on EFnet IRC  %% Stop Plate Tectonics!
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