On Wed, Mar 22, 2000 at 04:46:38PM -0800, Murray Sargent wrote:
> What a horrible summary of the history of IBM PC! Pls read the intro to my
> book "The Personal Computer from the Inside Out", Addison-Wesley (or one of
> the original editions under the title of "The IBM Personal Computer from the
> Inside Out"). It gives quite a different perspective from a couple of
> authors thoroughly familiar with the CP/M - Apple II environment at the
> time. It also goes into great length describing the hardware and software
> that made the machine such a success in its time. Sure things are much
> better now, but IBM did some really cool stuff relative to the state of the
> PC art at the time. Then after the IBM AT (a stunning machine for its
> time), mainstream IBM caught on, got worried, and disrupted the free spirit
> that got the IBM PC going, causing IBM PCs to flounder. E.g., the PS2 line
> came out long after Compaq and others had 386 boxes running well and had
> stolen the market.
I remember being stunned that IBM actually used ASCII as the first
128 charactes in CP437. Until then, the EBCDIC family was the IBM way of
doing character sets. CP437 was a real step in the right direction
for IBM. I do not think iso-8859-1 was available at the time they
introduced the PC.
Keld
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