PC XT in da house!

[OldComputerGuy]

Found a PC XT for sale for $55 and grabbed it. It has a hard drive and at some point someone replaced the full height 5 1/4 inch drive with a half height 5 1/4 and half height 3 1/2. There are a bunch of cards in it, too, that I haven't attempted to identify yet. I figured the price was too good to let it pass by as these older machines have increased a lot in price since I first started in this hobby. I was hoping it would be an XT 286, but no such luck. Rumor has it that the XT 286 actually runs faster than an AT at the same clock speed due to having faster memory chips on the motherboard. I have never tried to verify this, though.

[Brutman]

XTs are generally nice machines. They are widely compatible with everything, which is the complete opposite of the PCjr. They have 8 slots instead of five, which makes them more versatile than the original PC 5150. They don't have a cassette port, but nobody is perfect - only the PCjr and the original PC can brag about that.

The XT-286 is interesting, but it's a compromise. You get the faster CPU and system performance and it is faster than an AT at the same clock speed because of the zero wait-state RAM. But they didn't last too long .. they were late in the PC series and the clones wiped them out.

[RuneRider]

Nice pick-up. I'm looking to get an XT for my collection. I'd like a PC class IBM to play with as my 5150 is NIB and I don't want to take it out and use it.

An XT 286 would be very nice, but I don't have the cash for something like that.

[OldComputerGuy]

XTs are generally nice machines. They are widely compatible with everything, which is the complete opposite of the PCjr. They have 8 slots instead of five, which makes them more versatile than the original PC 5150. They don't have a cassette port, but nobody is perfect - only the PCjr and the original PC can brag about that.

The XT-286 is interesting, but it's a compromise. You get the faster CPU and system performance and it is faster than an AT at the same clock speed because of the zero wait-state RAM. But they didn't last too long .. they were late in the PC series and the clones wiped them out.

Was there a lot released on cassette for PC?

[Brutman]

I don't think anything was ever sold on cassette. IBM had a cassette version of the diagnostics for 5150 PCs without a floppy drive, and that is the only commercial cassette software that I know of for the IBM PC series. (Including the PCjr.)