On Mon, 15 Jan 2018 12:08:47 -0500 (EST) "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
- the IBM PC was not a great technical step forward BUT it set a template around which everyone could standardize. The network effect.
- how much could you legally copy the PC?
I wound up getting a made in Canada XT(?) clone, the Exceltronics BEST. It worked well, ran all the usual programs, and worked with all the usual expansion cards I plugged in. I hotrodded it eventually with a V20 and a memory upgrade to 768K, with the expected results. The company was terrible to deal with. When I walked in off the street, the salesmen were confabbing in a corner, so the one who talked to me and got the business was the high-school intern who was there for the Apple IIs. They never seemed to forgive me, never fulfilled the software part of the deal, and I had to get a refund and buy at one of the other stores along College. When I went for the memory upgrade, had to go to Mississauga. The guy gave me the decoding PAL and a stick of ceramic DRAMs with metal tops, and gouges and scrapes and screwdriver dings. "These have been through the wars", I said, and he took them and went back and brought a stick of new plastic DRAMs. It took me a while to reflect that it might not be the company's fault, that the guy might have got those old chips at a swapfest, and figured that if he could fob them off on me, he could keep the new ones for his own account. But the machine worked just fine.