> 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.

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estimator7292 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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forinti 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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!

	▲	ddingus 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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numpad0 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.