I still have my PC (that my mom bought for our family, used, in 1987). It has an AST SixPakPlus which expands memory up to 640KiB, game port (analog joystick and digital buttons), parallel port, serial port, real-time clock with battery (if you didn't have that you'd have have DOS ask you for the time and date every time you booted up).
I think it came with software to help you use all that RAM, like a print spooler and a RAM drive. The 1987 version of the manual talks about the software on page ix [1].
(I also noticed the manual mentions you can enable/disable parity checking. I wonder if that would let me leave 1/9 of the chips out since I have a few bad chips and have to use less than 640KiB currently. I should just try to source some replacement chips though.)
Fun fact: The 8-Bit Guy (from YouTube) used to work at AST.
I think it came with software to help you use all that RAM, like a print spooler and a RAM drive. The 1987 version of the manual talks about the software on page ix [1].
(I also noticed the manual mentions you can enable/disable parity checking. I wonder if that would let me leave 1/9 of the chips out since I have a few bad chips and have to use less than 640KiB currently. I should just try to source some replacement chips though.)
Fun fact: The 8-Bit Guy (from YouTube) used to work at AST.
[1] AST SixPakPlus manual (PDF) http://vtda.org/docs/computing/AST/000490-001A_SixPakPlusUse...