I have been digging through some of my old stuff lately, so just for fun, I thought I would set up my old IBM PC/XT clone.



As you can kind of see, I had some fun painting it way back when. I wasn't sure it would boot up, but when I turned it on, I was pleasantly surprised.



Wow, check out all that RAM! 512KB - yes, KILOBYTES!

Not only did it boot, but I was presented with my old familiar greeting, welcoming me (and whomever happened to be looking over my shoulder at the time - which was usually nobody) to my world. As you can see, the clock has failed to retain the time. This is a clear indication that the CMOS battery on the motherboard has finally given up the ghost. Not surprising. Though I probably should remove it before it corrodes everything.



Back then, I was known as Wild Bill on many of the local BBS systems in Tucson, Arizona. What's a BBS, you ask? It is a Bulletin Board System. It was more of a localized phenomenon before the Internet became a big deal.

As I was feeling my way around on the computer, trying to remember all my old commands and where my files were located, etc., I was suddenly greeted with a blue screen of death.



This, of course, is a blue screen that pre-dates the Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) which has become so familiar to so many, and the only reason this one is blue in the first place was because I changed my ANSI.SYS settings (via my AUTOEXEC.BAT file) to set the background color to blue. Was this a premonition? Apparently, my aging system drive C: is failing. This event reminded me that I ran into this a year (or two? or three? or ten?) ago when I got my computer out to play with on another occasion. The drive was failing then, and apparently I took steps to recover, because many files had been moved from the C: drive to the D: drive. Fortunately, I have two (count 'em, two!) 20 MB hard drives. That's right, you heard me: 20 MEGABYTES! Wow!

I thought I'd never fill them up.

I realized that my favorite compiler was not working, as it must have been bitten when the C: drive failed the last time I turned this beast on. So, what did I do? I dug out my old installation floppy and re-installed my favorite compiler.



Yep. That's good ol' Turbo Pascal. Version 4. I didn't get a picture of it, but the receipt is tucked inside the floppy sleeve there. I bought this piece of software on 12/22/1987 for a total of $96.26, including tax. What a steal, eh? Actually, that was a lot of money back then (it still is if you ask me).

I rebooted the computer and it booted again - fortunately! That's how I was able to re-install this. And the C: drive worked long enough for me to change to the D: drive and launch my compiler.



Man, this was hot shit back in the day! And, let me tell you, this 8Mhz (yes, MEGAHERTZ) machine was really screaming! Yep. That was back when you could actually read the directory listings as they painted themselves across the screen.

The reason I wanted to load this up tonight was for this little clock program I wrote years ago. You see, I wanted to turn this old computer into a big ol' clunky clock.



Actually, there's a little more to the story than that. You see, I wrote this program for a special purpose. Back in 1989, at 01:23:45 on 6/7/89 in fact, the date and time displayed a nice sequence of numbers, as you can see. 0123456789. This clock, when it encountered that time (in the a.m. and the p.m.) saved a snapshot of the screen to disk at exactly that time. Silly, I know, but I do things like that.

I seem to recall at least thinking about getting 12:34:56 on 7/8/90, but apparently I missed that one. Too bad. However, a friend of mine coincidentally pointed out to me (just yesterday) that tomorrow, there will be a similar situation, at 01:02:03 04/05/06 - a.m. and p.m. So, silly me, I decided to capture the time ... using the same computer ... and on the very same floppy disk.



Fortunately, I was able to modify and recompile my program to accomplish this, and I'm just going to leave it up and running until the time elapses tomorrow. It may be the last thing this computer does. Hmm. Perhaps it was in 1990 that I discovered my C: drive failing (just like my memory!), which may explain why I missed 12:34:56 7/8/90.

Anyway, the clock is ticking!