19 Oct
2012
19 Oct
'12
11:37 a.m.
On 10/19/2012 02:18 AM, jim s wrote:
This is an auction for a system on Ebay which might be
interesting.
It is listed as a "Northstar Horizon" but has what appears to be a
single board system marked Ferguson. That would probably not be from
Northstar.
Also it is built up with 8" floppies which is even less related to
Northstar.
it appears he got a pile for a Northstar system with the Ferguson
homebuilt which is in an Incoterm box which holds the floppies. There
is a listing for a bigboard on bitsavers which is probably for this
system.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/400301360595
Price may actually be something if anyone feels a burning need for a
Ferguson board, but I think its high for an ordinary Horizon. Too bad
there is a missing Horizon.
Northstar never had a sing board system. that is not a northstar, nor
can the NS controller be easily used
with an 8" floppy being 10sector hard sector format with connector/cable
pinout for 5.25" floppies.
Ferguson did make a single board that was roughly similar to the Xerox
Bigboard. that worked with
8" floppies but could be used with smaller.
I have many examples of NS* Horizon and Advantage systems. Horizon was
S100, minimal was
the S100 backplane that also had the IO and three boards (CPU, Ram,
Floppy) and the case had
two holes for vertically mounted 5.25" full height floppies.
Allison