Science Forums 2

[Boerseun]

After a few years of searching, I finally found what I was looking for:

A mint-condition 1982 IBM XT box, screen, keyboard, the works. It's so cool! It's been standing in a dusty garage for close on 15 years now, and I've just finished cleaning it. The owner had absolutely no use for it (save for a doorstop or an anchor), and gave it to me for free.

But here's the problem:

Upon switching it on, it counts and tests its memory (A FULL 128K WORTH OF RAM!!! AWESOME!!!) and then it says ERROR: Press F1 to continue... and that's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now - the last time I troubleshooted XT's was, maybe, roughly around 1990. I can't remember the error codes. I cannot get to the hard drive on this machine, and there's no way of interfacing the drive with my shiny new Athlon. Obviously. So, on pressing F1, like I'm instructed to do, absolutely nothing happens. Zip. It just beeps on the keypress, and that's it.

Now, I'd like to get this thing up and running, as a sort of mint-condition museum piece. I'd like to show my kids one day old programming by introducing them first to BASIC and GW-BASIC, proper old-school line-numbered programming. I think that'll be so awesome to illustrate the logic-flow. But if the hard drive is stuffed, I might as well give the whole contraption to my friend's kid right now to have him take it apart and play with it. He's now seven, armed with a screwdriver and dangeroud to any appliance in the house. I think it'll be cool to be allowed to strip a computer down to bits when you're seven. Nobody gave me one to strip down when I was seven!

So - anyone remember what that F1 error code meant on the old-time XT's?