Talk:IBM PC/Archive 1
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Floppy disk capacities/formats on IBM PC
The article states that the 1981 PC had one or two 360 KB 5¼-inch single-sided double density floppy disk drives."
The 360 KB disk was a double-sided disk using forty tracks per side and nine sectors per track (512 bytes/sector * 9 * 40 * 2 = 368640).
There were also double sided 320 KB disks, using eight sectors/track. Also, there were single-sided disks with half these capacities.
I don't know if any size other than 360 was used on the PC. My correction here is only to say that 360 was a double sided disk. Jm546 21:41, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
- Yes, the very earliest versions of PC-DOS/MS-DOS used the 160/320K format rather than that 180/360K format. As far as I know, there was no physical difference in the disks, and it was just a formatting issue. I don't personally recall which version it was, but this site (http://www.myoldcomputers.com/museum/soft/pcdos.htm) seems to indicate that it came in with 2.0 and that the very first PC models with DOS 1.0 had single-sided-only drives Nkedel 18:16, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
Character set
"The original IBM PC used the 7-bit ASCII alphabet as its basis, but extended it to 8 bits with nonstandard character codes." Was this EBCDIC or something else? HiFiGuy 20:42, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
- EBCDIC is totally incompatible with standard ASCII. Basically, back in the 1980s, every computer company had their own use for the top eight 128 characters (and often the lower thirty-two). So on the PC, the characters from 32-127 were "standard ASCII", but (most of) 0-31 and 128-255 were IBM graphics characters. Standard ASCII defines 0-31 as control characters, and doesn't use the eighth bit. Nate 02:30, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
Not quite right
There's something wrong with this article, or at least the opening section.
I changed the opening sentence "IBM PC is a trademark of IBM"; whether this is legally required or not, it shouldn't go there (if you want to nitpick, it doesn't even refer to the article subject, it refers to the *name* of the subject).
But that was the obvious problem; somehow, the opening section doesn't get across that this was *the* first "Wintel" PC, or the importance of that. I'd like to rewrite it myself, but I'm honestly not sure how to do it; I don't want to get bogged down in a verbose explanation. Fourohfour 13:43, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
Expansion slots
The PC/XT's 8 expansion slots were closer together than the PC's five. The slot spacing on the PC/XT became a standard still used today on all PC compatable systems. This info needs stuck into the XT section somehow. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.136.145.219 (talk • contribs) . Fourohfour 19:14, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
