18 Apr
2013
18 Apr
'13
8:28 p.m.
On 18 Apr 2013, at 13:17, "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com>
wrote:
I wonder how they handled the extended keyboard buttons. Did they include a
keyboard? ;)
Yes, there was a special keyboard.
I figured there would have been.
Speaking of keyboards?it seems like one of the ones you gave me has failed! Seems to be
an issue with its little electronics.
On 04/18/2013 01:14 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
How many people outside of IBM cloned it though? It definitely didn't survive as long
as PCI.
Yeah. Every time I think of IBM mainframe
designs...I can't help but wonder
why microchannel for the microcomputer market never took off.
I'm not sure it's fair to say that it never took off. It was very popular
for a long time. Many manufacturers made MCA cards. It was also big in the
RS/6000 world.
However...that has nothing at all to do with mainframes. Some of the
"baby" development system "mainframes" like the P/390 do use
MCA...there's an
MCA version of the P/390 card. (that was the first one, the next two were PCI)
I thought the architecture was derived from some of the designs IBM implemented for the
busses in their mainframes?
MCA was really a microcomputers-only bus.
True.
> That interface board allows one to connect a
PeeCee (or a Mac, or whatever
> it's for) to one of those establishment controllers.
I want to know more about these boards now, did software come with them?
Like other application-specific boards, they usually came with a driver
disk and likely a 3270-ish terminal program.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA