On Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:57:04 -0500, Jack Erbes
wrote:

Vic Smith wrote:
snip
I went with the first IBM PC, the 8088, 64k mem, single floppy deal.
Tricked it all out a bit later, so it was a hot rod. Heh.
Think I paid 2700 bucks for the barebones.
The IBM monitor was the green.
Clones were coming with amber monitors, and to my eyes they were
"tacky." Never told anybody that until now.

--Vic

Tacky? That amber monitor only came with the Cadillacs of the 5150's!

The amber was a lot easier on the eyes for extended use. And with that,
the Hercules graphic card, and a second floppy drive I was the King of
WordStar for a long time.

Maybe the IBM had better text resolution, at least to my eyes. Every
amber monitor I saw looked "fuzzy' to me.

I was only a mere Chief Petty Officer but I had figured out how to use
WordStar on a dual floppy PC and even the officers came to sip at the
font of knowledge...

Well Chief, I'd expect you'd spend your time in the Chiefs lounge
gabbing with your mates and having a "secret" beer instead of f**king
around on a PC. That's what my Chiefs did, anyway. I bet you weren't
a BTC. (-:

And I thinking you might have had 640k of RAM? I don't think you could
run a floppy disk on a 64k 5150. Maybe though.

Nah. Floppy drivers are hard wired I think. I still use one for any
of my Ghosting, as I don't even have to think about drivers
I seem to remember the PC I bought having 32k standard, and had them
add another 32k for maybe over a hundred bucks extra.
Later, when I had the money, I added an AST 6-pack to max the memory,
and set up a virtual drive. Still later I got one of those 500 buck
20 meg Winchester hard drives. I never worried about graphics cards
until I started gaming, since I was mostly programming on that old PC.

http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5150.html

Good link

--Vic