Path: utzoo!censor!geac!yunexus!maccs!cs4g6ag
From: cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Buying a Clone - Questions.
Message-ID: <2521ADB3.17675@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca>
Date: 28 Sep 89 05:35:47 GMT
References: <1989Sep25.182151.11161@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn)
Organization: McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario
Lines: 46

Jim Alain Laredo writes:
$    I am planning to buy PC-Clone to develop some software, after
$shopping around looking for the best deal I found one that comes with
$everything but the monitor. It includes a 40 MB Conner Hard Disk
$(model CP340 28mS) a whole bunch of features and a TTL video adaptor. 
$I am planning to buy a monochrome monitor and I intend to run packages 
$like turbo-c, turbo-pascal, and other windows software like vitamin C.

$  My questions are: 
$      -   Is this brand of HD reliable?, have you heard about it?, have
$      you had any experience?

   I've never heard of it, so I can't recommend one way or the other.  If
you find it to not be a good choice, you might want to consider the
Miniscribe 3053 (half-height, 44 Mb, 25 ms) - I've had mine for just over a
year and it's great; my brother also has a Miniscribe and has had no
problems with it, and the computer shop he used to hang out at almost
never had one come in for repairs.

   There was a discussion somewhere a while ago in which someone suggested
that Miniscribe had gone under ... I don't recall if the final consensus was
that this was true or not.

$      -   Do I need any additional circuit boards to run the different window
$      environments?, what are the so called Monographic HCG cards, that
$      are announced in some flyers?

   Monographic (or Hercules or HGC) cards are monochrome graphics cards.
IBM originally offered two display cards for its PCs - the monochrome display
adapter, which did only text, or the pitiful CGA.  Hercules came up with a
card that was compatible in text mode with the MDA but which offered a
graphics mode which was vastly superior in resolution to the CGA (720x348 as
opposed to 640x200; in fact, it even beats the EGA).  This much-cloned card
is the original monographic card.

   Most serious business software supports the Herc (Symphony/Lotus, Harvard
Graphics, various incarnations of Windows, WordPerfect, just to name afew);
many video games don't (although there are programs around to emulate a
CGA on a Herc).  Turbo Pascal 4 and up (and, I believe, recent versions of
Turbo C as well) support the Herc.

-- 
Stephen M. Dunn                         cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca
**********************************************************************
        = "\nI'm only an undergraduate!!!\n";
"VM is like an orgasm:  the less you have to fake, the better." - S.C.