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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

The PC had no RTC, so DOS would ask you the date and time every time you booted it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PC_DOS_1.10_screenshot.pn...

...and if you accepted the default, as many people at the time did, it would be 1980-01-01 00:00:00. DOS and the PC actually had no Y2K problem, storing the number of years since 1980 in a single byte --- which will overflow after 2235. It is notable that there is no year 2038 problem either.

I'm not sure what the Alto's RTC capabilities are. Hopefully a bit better than the PC's?

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Yeah, yeah, get me the EGA card/memory update that includes the Dallas real time clock!

It's always weird hardware combinations like that that makes me look batch at the early PC era and wonder what drove some of those decisions. Like all the sound cards that included a free extra ide controller for running CD-ROMs, you couldn't boot off them most of time but it meant you could play games and music CDs, assuming you had the correct extra audio cable to connect the two (many systems couldn't read the raw data fast enough to play without the drive doing the decoding).

And then I could swear at least one of my video cards added a joystick port.

Both of these make perfect sense. On early PCs everything was on a ISA card. Your parallel ports, serial ports, HD controller, floppy controller and video. Dallas RTC and video upgrade were probably the 2 most popular upgrades but you likely didn't have slots available for both, so putting both on a single card makes complete sense.

When sound cards came out with ide ports many computers still had ST-506 hard drives and not ide drives. Even if they did they might only have a single IDE port which was already being used or using it for a CD-ROM required on mounting your hardrive to switch master/slave jumpers on your hard drive. As since people at the time were installing sound cards for games and many need games requires CD-ROM drives the painting makes perfect sense. When soundcards with ports for CD-ROM drives first came out they weren't even necessarily ide ports. Some were SCSI or Sony CD-ROM ports.

In many cases you even saw the soundcards and CD-ROMs bundled together (and a pack-in demo CD or even a game) as that was such a common path to buy a computer, then upgrade it for sound and CD at the same time.

All of my joystick ports were on sound cards. As for the IDE controller, a lot of computers in the late 80s and early 90s only had one IDE channel, and it was pretty common to buy a sound card and CD-ROM at the same time (I remember the first ones my family bought were bundled in a "multimedia upgrade kit"). If you already had two hard drives, you were short on options, except that the sound card provided a solution.

Boggle. I'm amazed my old meat based brain can remember something like that 25 years later.

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