8 Mar
2008
8 Mar
'08
5:59 a.m.
On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
On Friday 07 March 2008 17:34, Tony Duell wrote:
Which reminds me, does anybody else remember those machines that had multiple
CPUs in them? Or the option of plugging different ones in? Seems to me real
early on there were some mfrs trying to find as much compatibility as they
could with pursuing options like that. I remember one Taiwanese-made clone
of an Apple II that had a Z80 on the main board, and of course the c128 has
that similar setup (though the way the hardware was structured the z80
effectively ran at something like 2.5MHz). I remember some other system
where you could literally plug in different processors for different uses,
but the brand name isn't coming to mind at the moment.
That may be the Dimension 2000. I have one in my collection, along with
the Z80 and 6502 CPU boards. Always wanted to find the rarer board that
used a National Semi 32?? something to run an earlier version of Unix.
--
Thinking
back a homebrew computer ( with a change in the cpu card) was
in BYTE a 6800 or a 6502 machine.
The 6800 and 6502 buses are indeed very similar, so this does not suprise
me at all.
I think the UK-designed Tangerine machine had a CPU card with overlapping
40 pin IC pads for either a 6800 or a 6502 (you had to change the monitor
ROMs as well, of course).