Problems with IBM 5150 Power

[Chris M]

--- On Sun, 8/2/09, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:

> Sure helped me a lot. Once I had my 5150, soon thereafter I
> started trying
> to build XTs by buying Taiwan bare motherboards (mostly
> infringinf copies
> of IBM's) and soldering Augat sockets to them.  Since
> that was also to
> improve my ability to solder, they did sometimes need
> troubleshooting.
> By looking at the boot code in the BIOS, I was able to
> determine how far
> it was getting in the boot process, and therefore some
> hints of what to
> look at.  When P.O.S.T. cards came out, that made that
> much easier.

 I'm beginning to think peeps like you, Chuckster, Allison,..., should have been writing books back then. I happen to like some of Peter Norton's stuff, sure helped me when there was little else that would. You also have to understand that there was also a lot of misinformation.
 We realize that people like you were pioneers. Most of us just don't have the same talents. I couldn't make heads or tails of assembly language (started poking around when someone gave me MASM for the T2K), and through up my hands. Bought some expensive (for then) books. No go. Found the right text (thank God for good, down to earth authors), and 2 weeks later I could actually write some code.
 Don't misunderstand me. What you're talking about is very interesting. The average jamoke probably won't have the patience to sort through bios code. Not from the getgo anyway. I myself am fascinated by the notion of code being tuned for specific hardware these days. In an earlier case Andrew Tanenbaum mentions having to account for temperature variations in some chips in his Minix text (not in front of me). I still haven't figured out what hardware he's talking about. The 8088 platform wasn't that unstable, was it???

> BTW, "mobo"???  

 Actually the "mobo" in the 5150 isn't one at all technically. It's a main logic board. A motherboard is supposed to be synonymous w/a passive backplane. But I'll bet that term likely died by the time the 5150 was released.

> BTW, when the 5150 first came out, I started in on twenty
> years of
> teaching programming at Merritt College.

 When I finally took assembler as a community college course, I'm sad to say I learned virtually nothing about programming. Despite the fact that the guy worked in industry (he was almost 60 at that point) he didn't know what the Trap flag was for! Maybe he forgot (kind of hard to wouldn't you say?). I kept my mouth shut. There are always tips that can be gleaned from old hands though. Learned a few things, but nothing about writing code specifically. I do suppose that we should be grateful that anyone teaches assembler at all anymore.

> >  The point is _most_ of us aren't going to plumb
> the depths as you or
> > someone like Chuck did in the old days.
> 
> . . . when we walked 10 miles through the snow uphill, both
> ways, . . .

 Uh, I actually doubt either of you are old enough to remember all that！

> OK
> In my day, there weren't any good PC troubleshooting
> guides.
> The IBM Hardware Reference guide was just a board swapping
> text!
> In those days, the Tech Ref was the ONLY reference
> available.

 ...and a semester later, it was stated that a variable is basically synonymous w/"memory location", in a manner of speaking. I certainly knew what a variable was, far earlier on hacked into games to bump up my stats so I could really kick some..uh. But if I were asked to explain it quite that way, I think I would have had a hard time. Most people that like this stuff are more doers then talkers (or teachers). I am sometimes surprised at my ability to work through a problem that people sometimes w/far more experience have trouble doing. But explaining it is another matter. Probably why there are so few good books out there....