21 Sep
1998
21 Sep
'98
9:39 a.m.
Well, I feel the same way about Apples. I mean, I find Apple IIs as
boring as any PC XT. And both are quite common. I sometimes find
various PC clone models interesting, but not very. But about these
370 cards, am I to understand they're normal PCs that can also act
like 370s?
You're right! I should have paid more attention to
the NAQ list.
I guess there's simply no refuge from x86 PCs; they invade every
newsgroup
and mailing list. Not to mention surplus stores;
it's getting very
hard
to find anything interesting because the places are
completely overrun
with PC crap. As if anyone really wants huge piles of off-brand EGA
cards
(or any EGA cards), ARCnet cards, etc. Sigh.
The only halfway interesting PC-based hardware I've ever found surplus
are
the XT/370 and AT/370 board sets, and I've never
gotten the software
for
them. If anyone wants them, though, I think Timeline
is still
advertising
them. Be forewarned, however, that they are mapped to
the 512K-640K
memory address range, so they won't work unless you have a motherboard
that
can be configured to NOT provide memory in that range.
These boards contained three processors, a custom-microcoded 68000
variant
to implement the core 370 instruction set, a standard
68000 to
implement
the instructions that wouldn't fit in the microcode
of the first one,
and
a custom version of the 8087 hacked to do IBM radix-16
floating point
instead of IEEE.
Too bad no technical docs were ever available, it would be fun to port
Linux to them.
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com