Date   : Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:38:44 +0100
From   : zeem.uk@... (Alex Taylor)
Subject: BBC News - Retro computers on display to fans at

On 6 July 2010 17:30, Tim Fardell <tim.fardell@...> wrote:
> Darren Grant wrote:
>> Cool, I can see my old IBM PC Convertible that I donated to the museum
about 21 seconds in. A pretty neat system as the screen could be taken off
and there is even BASIC in the ROM!
>
> I had one of those! I think I gave it away to someone, and lost track
> of it :-(
>
> I could never figure out why the ROM-based BASIC was called "Cassette
> BASIC" ??

It was a hangover from the original IBM PC (model 5150) that booted to
ROM BASIC when there was no other bootable device found - the storage
medium defaulting to cassette. I had one of these once, and wrote a
hello world program just to save it to tape and listen to it, so I
could say that I'd used and heard an IBM PC program on tape. I sold it
to John Elliot in the end, although the 10MB hard drive it had (pulled
from an XT) had died in storage. The machine still had its 63W PSU so
it wouldn't run the hard drive without dangling another PSU off the
side of it anyway.

-- 
Alex Taylor