On Dec 13, 2008, at 7:03 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
I seem
to remember something about co-processor boards with i860
chips on
them?
Yes, RCS has some of those kicking around.
Quite some time back I used an OCR package on a 486 that used the AMD
29K PeeCee development board for the horsepower.
In 1988 or so, I used a similar OCR setup at work. I think it was
called Calera, but I'm not sure. It used an ISA board with a 16MHz
68020 and a bunch of memory on it. It ran under DOS. Its code was all
RAM-based, and was downloaded into the board at boot time by programs
run from autoexec.bat.
That's interesting - so I wonder if they made a design decision to use the
68k, or did they already have a product based around a 68k (possibly on a
Mac?) and it made the porting effort to the PC platform a lot easier just to
sell the product with a copro board? Back then most OCR products commanded a
huge price tag, so doubtless adding the cost of an ISA card didn't make much
difference (but I assume that they bought in the card from somewhere else
rather than making in-house?)
cheers
Jules