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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

When I was a kid, a kindly computer store owner (who also made me a great deal on an PC-semi-compatible running MS-DOS 1.25, for approx. a hundred lawns mowed and babies sat) sold me a copy of Turbo Pascal for generic MS-DOS (no PC BIOS assumed) on 8" floppy. He transferred it to the 160KB 5.25" format that my semi-compatible used.

I hope I was appreciative enough at the time, as I am now. That helped bootstrap my career.

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Okay, I'll bite :)

What's this "PC-semi-compatible" of which you speak?

Back in the early days, MS-DOS was very much like CP/M in that there were several different 8088 machines. The “PC Compatible” hadn’t quite exploded yet, so MS-DOS (and CP/M 86) compatibility was enough.

But soon, Flight Simulator became the benchmark for compatibility, and I think the final nail was that Lotus 1-2-3 required an actual PC compatible machine. That plus the rise of clone BIOSs pretty much ended the brief era of generic, 8088, non-PC compatible machines, save for niche domains.

An interesting artifact of this era was when Steve Ciarcia of BYTE magazine released his 8088 board, and it was not PC compatible. He made some different design decisions.

I thought it was the BIOS that was the compatibility issue. That's one of the few proprietary parts IBM had when they released their PC. Clones were built on a reverse engineered BIOS that, for a while, wasn't quite right. I vaguely recall 90% PC Compatible computers or something like that.

Halt and Catch Fire covers this. I could be wrong though.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/

Flight simulator as a test … still remember my boss tick that out as said you really cannot put that as requirement. We are in business not playing game …

Sanyo MBC-550 series. It later got MS-DOS 2.11.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBC-550

Missed this and commented separately. Thanks for reminding me of the model. This was my upgrade to the TI 99/4 I drove across the state of CT to spend 995 1980-ish dollars on.

That was my first computer too.

I remember back in the day working for a law firm that had some Wang MS-DOS compatible PCs. Note "MS-DOS" compatible, not PC compatible...they ran DOS without even trying to duplicate the IBM-PC BIOS, as Compaq eventually did.

That was the version of DOS that the Columbia MPC ran, and it was almost 100% compatible. I ran some code based on articles about the video card, and it couldn’t do the 160x100 mode that people wrote about.

So a lot of “clones” may have been this close as the Columbia was.

Interesting question... based on DOS 1.25, I can't imagine there are many choices. (Maybe the earliest Compaq machines among them).

Wang had some funny ones. They ran both MS Word and MS Multiplan.

Not the OP but in my case it was a Sanyo with 2 floppies.

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