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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

> built-in “cassette interface” of the PC (that was hardly ever used)

Wait a minute, what?? How did I not know about this.

Probably because they got rid of it when the XT came out, so it was only there for (a few months under) 2 years. But it was a good trade; removing the cassette port gave enough area on the PCB for 3 more ISA slots.

It's funny how close an early PC was to the 8-bit machines: you had BASIC in ROM and a cassette interface.

You could even use a TV!

I have made the mistake of calling the early PC 8-bit, lolol...

Yes, it reminds me of an Apple ][ computer, with the major difference being the Apple had the video sub-system on board, and the PC locating that on a card.

I often wonder how things might have played out had the Apple ][ computers used one slot for video... or, had IBM chose to do it the Apple way.

Apple computers all sort of gravitated to the onvoard video despite a few cards being made. It was just enough, especially when the later models included 80 column text.

I ran my first PC on a TV. Same as the Apple and Atari machines.

Fun times.

Way, way back when, you were lucky to get a serial port built in to the motherboard. everything was an add-in card. But you did get a tape drive interface. It was just an audio jack you plugged into any cassette player. You had to start and stop the tape yourself, of course.

Those aren't rare on 16-bit or less, '80s and before, pre-MS-DOS home computers. Looks cool, but apparently it was way too slow and painful to be fondly remembered.

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