This board makes me wistful for the days that popping a NEC V20 chip
into an XT and hearing the memory test click speed up reminded you of
how much farther into the SPACE AGE you were.



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On 12 Jun 2025, poindexter FORTRAN said the following...

This board makes me wistful for the days that popping a NEC V20 chip
into an XT and hearing the memory test click speed up reminded you of
how much farther into the SPACE AGE you were.

How about that RAM-disc using the memory above the OS limits?

Or buying a tube of memory chips?

Yeah....

... Shortcut: longest distance between two points

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BY: poindexter FORTRAN (21:4/122)

|11pF|09> |10This board makes me wistful for the days that popping a NEC V20 chip|07
|11pF|09> |10into an XT and hearing the memory test click speed up reminded you of|07
|11pF|09> |10how much farther into the SPACE AGE you were.|07
Or the joy of going from a 1mb graphics card to a 8mb graphics card.


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This board makes me wistful for the days that popping a NEC V20 chip
into an XT and hearing the memory test click speed up reminded you of
how much farther into the SPACE AGE you were.

And we still haven't put a man or woman on the moon since Apollo 17!

The PC/XT era was a bit before my time (I was a toddler when it was released) but it seems the ability to "just" switch the CPU and get speed increase was pretty cool.

How much did it improve performance? Was there anything in particular that went much faster with a V20?

... Where is Wally in VGA Planets?

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On 24 Jun 2025, kirkspragg said the following...

How much did it improve performance? Was there anything in particular
that went much faster with a V20?

Enough that others envied you for having an upgraded machine.

I had the V20/30 upgrade (40 years is a long time to remember unimportant details like exact chip names) in a Columbia 1600 VP in England and even the IT techs at the University were impressed.

A few years later the V-chips were nothing burgers, as the main common PC chips had passed them up.

Putting things into context, the use of benchmarking applications wasn't all that common outside of IT techs, and I tended to measure how many sips of coffee one could take while waiting when I ran my linear regression programs. Less sips between enter and results was a faster experience.....

... Running Windows is better than washing them!

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kirkspragg wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

How much did it improve performance? Was there anything in particular
that went much faster with a V20?

I forget the specifics, but in benchmarks, an 8 mhz V20 "appeared" to be
an 11 mhz 8088. The beauty was that it was 100% pin and instruction-set compatible - pull the 8088 out, drop in the V20, and you're good to go.



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k9zw wrote to kirkspragg <=-

Putting things into context, the use of benchmarking applications
wasn't all that common outside of IT techs, and I tended to measure how many sips of coffee one could take while waiting when I ran my linear regression programs. Less sips between enter and results was a faster experience.....

It seemed like everyone had a pirated copy of AutoCAD back then, and
seeing how long it took to render the rocket engine nozzle or the space
shuttle wireframe was common.

I thought I was pretty cool with my V20. My next door neighbor in the
dorms had a Compaq 286 with a 287 and I was shocked at how fast it was
by comparison.



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