peterr (03/11/83)
As rumoured earlier, IBM did indeed make a major announcment on March 8th.
They announced the IBM Personal Computer XT (a two-letter acronym for
extended, I think; I guess only the big computers get 3LA's), which comes
with 128K std (expandable to 256K on the mother board, using 64K chips),
a 368K dual-sided disk, a 10Mb Winchester, and the std IBM Async Board
for $7545 in Canada. The new PC is a logical redesign of the original,
differentiated by its 1/4M mother-board memory capacity and an extra 3
expansion slots (though only suitable for 1/2 length boards).
I had a look at a PC XT at the local IBM Product Centre and it's just
about exactly what one would expect. The system unit looks like the original,
though it's a bit wider to accomodate the extra slots. The power supply looks
improved. I couldn't get a good look at the motherboard as the machine was
sporting a complement of 4 or 5 full length boards. One surprise was that the
10Mb Winchester had a label indicating it was made by "MicroScribe", of
Colorado, which I've never heard of.
Two more new products were in evidence at the product centre. The IBM PC
Colour Display ($1025 Cdn) is a beautiful RGB monitor styled like the
Monochrome Display. It is a 13" set which can reproduce the IBM's 640x200
resolution graphics mode. A manual for DOS 2.00 was also available for
reference. It is vastly improved over DOS 1.10, adding such things as a
printer spooler, user-loadable device drivers, a tree-structured file
system (with mkdir, rmdir commands), enhanced screen support (e.g. cursor
control-- possibly VT100 like support, but I didn't check closely, the
manual is very big, rather cramping the std size IBM binder), 13% disk
usage increase (9 sectors per track instead of 8), a hard disk driver,
and on and on. Also included is a new BASIC for which documentation
wasn't available. They've even added a "more" command, for 4.1BSD users.
>From the OS point of view, one can have system commands executed from
within a program and there is a distinct notion of a shell. There is a
great deal that is new, so I haven't been able to cover it all, even if
I could remember all that I read. The DOS is still very reasonably
priced, at $75 Cdn, making it one of the best deals around.
Announced, but not in view, are two expansion units for the PC: the
Model 1, with a 10Mb drive, disk adapter, and probably more slots,
designed to be attached to the PC ($5025 Cdn) and the Model 2, which
is the same for the PC/XT ($3979 Cdn).
Prices for the basic PC, the colour adapter, and the serial board have
been reduced, and, finally, new versions of the Peachtree packages,
together with their new word processor were announced.
The press release claims that all these products are available
immediately, and the PC XT probably is, but DOS 2.0, for example, won't
be available for separate purchase for at least a month.
Hardly revolutionary announcements, but welcome, particularly DOS 2.00.
It is interesting to note that the Winchester is not an option with the
PC/XT; one has to buy it to get the XT, according to the price list I have.