4 Nov
1998
4 Nov
'98
9:04 a.m.
Once upon a midnight dreary, Ward Donald Griffiths III had spoken clearly:
Roger Merchberger wrote:
> Was this the first MCA "clone"?
>
> I'm pretty sure the MC5000 came out in '88, so it's ontrack topically.
Don't recall the precise release date, but they
were definitely out
when I attended the Tangent (Tandy Professional Users Group)
conference in Fort Worth in 1987.
I checked my '87 computer catalog (it's here at work) and it wasn't in
there. My '88 is at home, so it's prolly in there.
Not exactly a "clone". The MCA architecture
was fully licensed and
paid for by Tandy to IBM.
Yes... and ISTR that IBM wanted a small fortune for that license as well.
Prolly one of the reasons it never caught on; very little profit to be made
as people weren't willing to shell out the big bucks for a system, and all
new cards as well (MCA stuff commanded quite a premium back then).
The 5000MC actually had a better MCA
implementation than the IBM systems at that point, as Tandy didn't
cripple the bus-mastering feature the way IBM did.
That I didn't know, as my main (work) machine was a CoCo3 until I needed
Autocad capability and my (then) employer loaned me a 486DX2/66 (which ran
the CoCo2 emulator pretty well...)
The CoCo3 is still set up next to "Goon" which is a Pentium II 350 (dual
capable) w/256Meg ram... and no, I've been too busy to try the CoCo 3
emulator on it... but in a couple weeks I should have time. I wrote a
(very, very) basic benchmark proggie in assembly... my Cyrix 150+ was
roughly an 8Mhz CoCo3. I'll let you know what my Pentium II runs like... if
my proggie doesn't need to be recoded.
Naturally the
machine died like a pig, leaving less of a ripple as it sank than
the Tandy 2000 or even the Tandy 600 portable had.
Too bad... the machine had potential. I remember seeing "MC5000" thinking
"yea, that's prolly the price..." Lo and behold: $4999! ( I think that was
it's initial roll-out price)
Anywho, enough rambling, & back to work.
Roger "Merch" Merchberger