Subj : Re: My new* 486 (*=old)
To   : poindexter FORTRAN
From : Ben Collver
Date : Thu Mar 02 2023 11:10:40

  Re: Re: My new* 486 (*=old)
  By: poindexter FORTRAN to Nightfox on Thu Mar 02 2023 05:59:00

PD> Jumpers.

PD> My XT had jumpers on the motherboard to control what drievs were present
PD> in the system. Jumpers on the IO card controlled the port config.
PD> Running a debug command from DOS got you into the firmware on the MFM
PD> disk controller to do low-level formatting.

Same here.  My first hard disk was a full-height 80 MB MFM disk and i
remember Dad initializing it using DEBUG.COM and a cheat sheet.  It was
the second loudest hard drive i have used. The loudest was a Seagate
SCSI drive from the same era.  It sounded like a box of marbles dropped
on a hard floor.

I read that old Compaq's came with a utility floppy for the BIOS
configuration.  If you lost the utility, then you lost the ability to
configure BIOS.  I think i might have used one of those floppies once.

.