winter's computers
found, loved, and nurtured for spring
my ugly geek secret

Sunday 10 June 2007

mabell

Model

  • AT&T PC 6300
Introduced
  • 1984
CPU
  • Intel 8086, 8 MHz
RAM
  • 640 KB
Video
  • 12" Monochrome
  • 640 x 200 CGA, 640 x 400 extended
Disk
  • 20 MB harddrive
  • 360 KB 5¼" floppy
Network
  • Interlink via parallel port
Operating Systems
  • MS-DOS 6.22
Features
  • Monitor uses 640x400
mabell is set up identically to bozo. It runs PCTools Desktop, in which I had created databases for phone messages, to do lists, tracking what shows we'd recorded on video tape, and various other mundane purposes.

It also has a couple of baby-bash programs I had written many years ago for Donnie Darko. I've got video of him bashing away at them. One program just made different shaded boxes with a corresponding tone every time a key was pressed. It was noisy and annoying and he loved it.

The other was more for showing to visitors. Every time a key was pressed the program would display the next character in a text file. The result was when Donnie bashed the keyboard perfect English would appear on the screen as if he had just typed it in.

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