Least PC-Compatible MS-DOS machines?

On Sunday (06/01/2014 at 01:37AM -0600), Eric Smith wrote: And a "Stearns". Up here in MN, some guys left CPT and built this machine that could actually boot PC-DOS but couldn't run any of the apps because they deliberately made it not quite compatible for fear of being sued by IBM. So, there were MS-DOS versions of MultiPlan, SuperCalc, DBaseII, and others that had to be run on it after majorly patching them for the weirdo (in PC terms) screen API-- that was much more like ANSI.SYS than any INT10 BIOS call and no video display memory at the same place as a PC. This thing had an 8086 in it, running 16-bit wide. It had EuroDIN connectors for the backplane and a home grown BIOS that changed pretty much every day. I know these machines all too well as we had over a hundred of them at ETA Systems between 1983 and 1989 to try to achieve one of the founder's goals of having a paperless office. They had dual floppy (5.25" half-height) and single floppy + 10MB hard drive models and MDA and CGA video cards built onto this 16-bit backplane with real expensive (then) connectors. They were a hoot. We were Stearn's largest customer at ETA (some say only customer :-) ) and I am the only non-Stearns employee to have taken and passed the factory service training program :-) I still have the certificate. I wrote countless TSRs to try to fix BIOS problems to make printers work on both serial and parallel interfaces and countless other serial comm and file transfer tools to communicate with Cyber 800 series mainframes we had in the ETA basement. Ah... the good 'ol days :-) Chris -- Chris Elmquist