Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "Early PCs at the National Museum of Computing" video.

  1. In the very early days, you were either in the S-100 (Altair compatible) camp or outside. The Altair and other copies were extendable with plug in cards, and the number and type of those cards multiplied enormously. The first cards where build it yourself, but at some point more cards were shipped prebuilt. The S-100 standard evolved into 16 bits with 24 bit (16 meg) addressing, with various processors, including the 8086 family. The Altair itself fell behind the market it started, gaining a reputation for being less reliable than others. When the IBM-PC shipped, it began to replace the S-100 family, but it took several years for that to happen. I used a S-100 compatible up to 1987, mainly because the IBM-PC was not a more powerful computer until the 80386 came out, and even then didn't get a OS powerful enough to actually use the 32 bit features of the CPU until 1992-1995 (Unix, OS/2 and Windows 95). I made up the difference, like many people did, by using "extenders", systems that used the 16 bit DOS/Windows OS, but hosted a 32 bit program on the 80386.
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