That was because of CMI, the contractor who built the drives for the AT,
not the XT. They were a little outfit that bid on the contract for the
drives for the AT on a lark. Unfortunately for them, they won.
Apparently they didn't pay much attention to the quantities solicited,
because when they were awarded the contract, they couldn't possibly
produce that many drives in the time specified. This led to frantic
sub-contracting and a slight problem with QC. IBM of course denied for
a long time that there was any problem at all... not unlike Commodore
and their little problem with their 1541 disk drive BIOS that when told
to "save and replace", sometimes replaced a different file than the one
you wanted.
Another manufacturer (Miniscribe?) did indeed take the CMI drives in
trade. They were loaded into the hull of a ship which had washed up
onto some poor woman's yard during a storm, and been abandoned by the
owners. It sat there for a long time until it was refloated, loaded
with dead hard drives and scuttled to form an artificial reef.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jose M. Sanchez [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 1999 4:16 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: To Power down or not to Power down, that is the question...
With the original IBM-PC XT's it was risky to merely turn the unit back
on.
The drives had terribly short lifespans... and many problems. Thus we
have
some new coral reefs thanks to IBM...
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