You’d be fussing around trying to find enough RAM expansion cards to get your system to 640K (including hot patching the BIOS since it had a bug that it could only get to 544K).
That was only the first 64k motherboard. ( Five slots only ). Fixed with the PC that came out less than two years later. My brothers machine only had 384k, and it was more than enough. Only three years after, I built 10Mhz XT w/ a V20 640k running Xenix.
One of my neighbours in Sydney sold a board he made in his garage, that gave you an extra ten slots, which I filled with way too much RAM. Sort of like a homebrewed 5161, before the 5161 existed.
That's kind of neat. Did he just extend the bus in a "raw" fashion or put buffers on it? (The downside of the 5161 was any memory device in the 5161 had an extra wait state thanks to the speed of the buffers, which were necessary to deal with the capacitance on the cable to the expansion unit.)
They were buffered, from my poor memory. So was slower when you exceeded mainboard memory, but you could load entire tapes into memory, which let you do things no one else could. Faster processing than disk/tape access.
