13 Sep
2005
13 Sep
'05
5:41 p.m.
On Tue, 13 Sep 2005, jim stephens wrote:
It was called "Superboard" and was no
relation to Supermicro, which
came much later. It had a bios that usually worked, but also had,
conveniently, a spot for up to 6 eprom chips, so you could put in a
PC bios if you could get a copy.
The "Superboard"s that I got were bare boards, with NO parts.
I filled them with Augat sockets. By the time that I was done,
my soldering had improved substantially.
The PC used either EProms, (16K I think) and the Roms
that were
shipped with the BIOS were registered. The standard Data I/O would
not read them since they were not programmable, and needed their
output enabled to read the data.
I just went into DEBUG, copied the 5150 ROMs to an available segment,
and wrote them to files. For reasons that I never found out, The
IBM ROMs, and copies thereof, could not handle DRIVPARM (present in
DOS 3.20 and above. But most aftermarket ROMs could.
First systems had a 63 watt P/S, and IBM cards if you
could find
them for video. Also there was no floppy controller on the first
board.
But there were also bare boards available for FDC, CGA, etc.
Maybe others of you can recall expansion card makers,
of such
things as serial, parallel, memory, floppy, then hard drive, etc.
The first aftermarket memory board was from Boulder Creek Systems.
It even did ECC!
I have some Tecmar "modular multifunction" boards to sell off the next
time that I can make it to VCF. Unfortunately, I am stuck with teaching
Saturdays this semester :-(
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com