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Comment by raldi | Hacker News Reader

We had an IBM PC XT with an expansion board that upgraded the 8088 to a 80286. To drop speeds back to approximately what they used to be, or toggle back, you would hold both shift keys at the same time, and it would respond with either a high- or low-frequency beep.

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If you don't mind me asking, is it possible you're misremembering? I believe the XT/286 was actually a different computer than the XT, and ran a 286 on the motherboard; it did not upgrade to 286 via expansion board.

I have fond memories of my XT/286.

The 80286 went into the IBM PC AT. The XT was the one with the 8088 chip. However after the AT 80286 came out, it was possible to get an upgrade card for the XT 8088 that was essentially an 80286 and motherboard on a card. It was like brain transplant for your computer. It wasn't as fast as running a real AT but it was cheaper and a lot faster than the 8088.

This doesn't sound right to me. We had an XT/286 and I don't recall any expansion card involved. Wikipedia seems to agree with me that it was a totally separate model. That being said, it doesn't include a citation for the info, so it's possible it's incorrect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT

>We had an XT/286 and I don't recall any expansion card involved...

And other people had an XT that they installed an expansion card into -- like the Pfaster-286[1]

[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=xsMx9D2s6y0C&pg=PA43&lpg=P...

The '286 expansion cards were not IBM products. they were produced by third parties to give the older XT performance approaching the AT '286 computers.

286 expansion cards were indeed a thing. Here's some discussion of them:

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?43553-286-processo...

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