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A comment on 80286 ATX mainboard based on the IBM 5170 AT PC.

Re:80286 ATX mainboard based on the IBM 5170 AT PC by PaulHoule on Wednesday November 13, 2024 @09:43AM (#42126465)
What I remember is clones of the IBM AT taking over because they delivered such unprecedented performance for the price. In the "8-bit" age of Apple and Commodore we looked up to minicomputers like the PDP-11 and Decsystem 20 but AT clones could surpass them and soon the 386 would surpass the VAX although it would take most of a decade for 32 bit OS to become mainstream.

When I was in high school I developed some software for a teacher on my PC, was a little shocked to find she was still running CP/M. It was no problem at all because I could emulate a Z-80 on my AT clone at 3x speed!

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Re:80286 ATX mainboard based on the IBM 5170 AT PC by bombcar on Wednesday November 13, 2024 @09:55AM (#42126562)
People forget that the jump from "no computer" to "any computer" is so huge as to be unprecedented.

It was very common to find ancient computers just being used for work and word-processing, etc, up to and into the Internet era.

The Internet was what mainly pushed those aside; once that really took off it became a question of "can you connect" and if you couldn't, an upgrade started looking really good.

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