29 Jun
2007
29 Jun
'07
11:08 p.m.
I was the designer of the Boulder Creek Systems board. It would have
been nice to be able
to disable the PC's base memory to allow all ECC memory but there was no
easy way without
hacking up the main board. At a West Cost Computer Show in 1982, some
IBM employees
came up to my booth and pulled out memory chips while the board was
running on an extender
card. They did not believe it was real ECC memory. After seeing it was
still running, IBM bought
50 boards. That was our biggest sale. No one else really cared about the
ECC, they just wanted
more memory for cheaper. The board had single bit correction, and
multi-bit detection which would
then generate the parity error. ECC codes were generated in a small
bipolar PROM. Somewhere
I still have my main board that I hacked to disable the RAM and run all
ECC cards.
Bob
Fred Cisin wrote:
> In late
1982?, I had a 192K ECC memory board from Boulder Creek
> Systems in a 5150
>
On Fri, 29 Jun 2007, woodelf wrote:
Could you disable the PC's memory and just
run the ECC board?
NO.
I could set the starting address, but no documentation on how to set it to
start at 0, and no obvious way to disable the soldered in first row of
RAM.