Great video, Homer. Thanks.
I worked on the AT at IBM and can add a few possibly interesting facts your probably won't find on the web.
We manufactured the motherboard and the PC-AT in Wangaratta, Australia. Other plants were at Vimercate in Italy, Greenock in Scotland and Boca Raton in Florida. The IBM plant at Wangaratta was bigger than all other electronics manufacturers in Australia combined. In fact, in 1995 we were the largest exporter on non-primary produce in the country. Today, the plant is nothing but a ghost building today after IBM abandoned the plant and sadly, the employees. Almost all the employees have left electronics as a career, somewhat disillusioned. Out of 600 employees, I think myself and another bloke named Bob who moved to the US are the only people still in the electronics industry. The high end HP and Tektronics test equipment was sold when the sold-off plant closed up in 2001, creating a big glut of quality test equipment in Australia. There was some specialist test equipment I designed and built at the plant. God knows where they are today.
The code name for the keyboard during development and manufacture was Naples. The keyboard was made in Lexington, Kentucky. As were the IBM PC printers. The Lexington plant was sold off as a new company called Lexmark around 1990.
The keys were originally taped to the front of the machine cover. They were placed in the bag carefully with the protrusions on the barrels pointing right, so the keys would look pleasing to the customer. IBM was paranoid over quality. But they failed to realise in the 1990's that customers wanted low cost, not quality.
IBM banned the use of rechargeable batteries (Nickel Cadmium) in their products due to environmental concerns. IBM was well ahead of its time with being environmentally aware. The IBM Wangaratta Plant was the first electronics manufacturing plant in the world to successfully introduce a no-clean soldering process. This was to eliminate the use of CFC's. Prior to that, we used one or two 44 gallon drums of CFC per week - all of which ended up in the atmosphere.
There was a diskette called Advanced Diagnostics, where you could run some fairly extensive tests. These diskettes were used in box sample testing in the plant, controlled by a keypress automation program (which I wrote). I think the VARS, VAMS and VADS had this diskette, but I do not recall it being provided to end users. I had the source code to Advanced Diagnostics and could modify it for my purposes. I also had the source code to BIOS and DOS.
The hard drive (or hard disk) was made by Seagate. Hideously expensive, but damn good.
I had an AT at my desk with a whopping 2MB of RAM. Having such a powerful machine and access to pre-release software, I was the first person to install OS/2 in Australia. It was the first multitasking O/S for the PC. OS/2 had no graphics then, but I got a big wow factor out of printing at the same time as doing other work (I think Sidekick could do that, sort of).
In 1988, I put in an employee suggestion to have an audio jack with a thumb wheel volume control added to the PC-AT. The suggestion was rejected. The reply was there is no foreseeable marketing value to have an adjustable volume control in a PC, and no reason to have headphones attached to a PC. But I thought otherwise, as I has drilled a hole in the PC-AT to plug in headphones to learn Morse Code during lunch time to get my full call ham license. IBM was too conservative and unable to respond to a rapidly changing market place.
They were good days in the 80's. We were one big happy family at IBM Wangaratta and around the world. Then along came a biscuit maker named Louis Gerstner to ruin it all in the late 1990's.