Customer Setup of the NCR PC-8. - THE CORE MEMORY

- Test ParticipantsTEST PLANTwo members of the ZJMTRI Human Factors Division attempted to assemble a PC-8. P'aul, the author of this report, is a 35-year-old scientist in the Division and anassistant professor of industrial engineering. He has a B.S. in mechanical engineering,masters degrees in both industrial engineering and psychology, and a joint Ph.D. in both.He has some knowledge of electronics, having put together a Heathkit H-8 8080-basedcomputer and an H-$9 video terminal by himself. He has had an IBM XT in his office andan I13M PC at home for several years. He has installed cards and replaced chips in bothcomputers. Paul has written programs in PLIC, FORTRAN, PDP-I assembler, andCRASH, and is a skilled BASIC programmer. He does most of his writing on his XT,using Vedit, and is familiar with most of the common software available for the Macintosh(MacWrite, MacPaint,, MacDraw, etc.).Don, who works with Paul, is a 22-year-old graduate student in industrialengineering at the Uriiversity of Michigan. (His undergraduate work was also in industrialengineering.) Don ha.s some experience with computer software, having written programsin FORTRAN and EIASlC, and has used application packages such as Symphony andVedit;, along with most of the general-purpose softwzre available for the Macintosh. Don'sinterests are in engineering economy and operations research.a ~ m e nand t Materials -Participants assembled a fairly complete NCR PC-8 (an IBM AT clone based on theIntel 80286 processor). Assemblies were shipped in five boxes that contained parts for twoPC-8 computers. When fully assembled, each computer had 640K on the motherboard, a20 megabyte hard disk drive, a 360K floppy drive, a seriallparallel adapter card, a graphicdisplay controller card, a keyboard, and a color display. (See Appendix B for the NCRmodel numbers.)Two of the boxes each contained one system unit (with 512K on the motherboard, aCDC Wren model 1 20 megabyte 5-114 inch hard disk drive, 1.2 megabyte 5-114 inchflopp!y (flex) drive, and serial-parallel adapter card all installed). Also in each box was asee-through bag containing miscellaneous items (reversible blade screwdriver, disk drivemounting slides, felt feet for the system unit), a box labeled "documentation" containingthe Owner's, DOS, anid BASIC manuals, a box containing the keyboard, and a power cord.