Eagle 1600

Computer published 42 years ago:

Eagle 1600 (c) 1983 Eagle Computer.

- TRIVIA -

The Eagle 1600 series of computers ran MS-DOS but were not clones. They were the first PCs to be based on the fully 16-bit Intel 8086 processor, rather than the Intel 8088, which used 16 bits internally, but only had an 8-bit external interface. Eagle attempted to create a niche for itself in the brand-new '16-bit' market by building machines that were as easy to use as their CP/M models, but had an Intel CPU and 640 kB of RAM (which was more memory than almost any other PC at that time had to offer).

These computers came with MS-DOS, the PC version of Spellbinder, a PC spreadsheet program, and documentation. They would run many PC programs, but at that time most PC programs were recent ports from CP/M and there was little agreement about standards. The fact that the 1600s were not IBM clones meant that games that expected exactly the same video hardware as an IBM PC, or that called PC hardware or the PC ROM BIOS directly for the sake of speed, would not run or ran very poorly.

The 1600 line were also the first computers with MS-DOS to have hard disks. Eagle achieved this by using the same hard-disk subsystem (Xebec hard-disk controller card, Eagle SASI card, and hard disk) as in the CP/M models. Subdirectories were not yet supported in the MS-DOS version that the Eagles used, just as in CP/M. MS-DOS did not offer CP/M's 16 numbered 'user zones' either, which somewhat limited the usefulness of the hard disks.

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