Questions tagged [ibm-pc]

I had one of those bulky IBM 486 PCs in the mid-1990s. Desktop form factor. I think it was probably made somewhere in 1992. It made a lot of noises, pleasant ones to me, such as mechanical hard drive ones, or the floppy disk station doing "its…

As I understand it, PC was not really competitive with Home computers until the 90’s. The PCs rise in popularity in the 80s must have been mainly in the business world. So during that time, what other options did people have for business computers?…

How did the parity check DRAM chips work? In particular, is there a reason for the gap in the motherboard (IBM calls this system board) between the parity check DRAM and the "normal" DRAM above it? There is a also a gap in the 8kB ROM sockets to the…

The original IBM PC used a timer from the 8254 PIT and a channel from the 8237 DMAC in order to refresh RAM with dummy reads (and I think used NMI to signal parity errors.) I'd like to know when PC's started having dedicated memory controllers.