Back when I was a teenager, I would have absolutely gone down a rabbit hole like the author did. From "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" to reading all the technical manuals, usenet, etc. I definitely nerded out over this stuff! Glad to see folks still take an interest.
These days, I've an acquired brain injury. Between that an old age, it was a bit hard to read, but also, just a little bit familiar, so I enjoyed it.
Now I am expecting "256 color VGA programming in C" to resurface at some point! :D
That was one option I thought of at first (mentioned in the first section), but the info I found indicated that the /370 models used the same firmware as the "plain" 5170s - if there were any BIOS extensions, they were probably somewhere on the add-on cards. The AT/370 also had 512K of on board RAM, while this BIOS seems to indicate 640K.
Details: The IBM AT/370 used standard bios on the motherboard, and the two 68k custom cards had their own bioses. The 68ks were very heavily modified by one of the motorola engineers.
Its the second version of the AT Bios that was disgusting was verion 2, that ran on 6mhz 286s and prevented you from swapping the crystal for a 16Mhz/8Mhz speed up. The first version had bugs, and the third version was for the 8Mhz machines. ( still a few bugs ).
These days, I've an acquired brain injury. Between that an old age, it was a bit hard to read, but also, just a little bit familiar, so I enjoyed it.
Now I am expecting "256 color VGA programming in C" to resurface at some point! :D
Old hardware was always so much fun...
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