BS al a Erlacher

Well, Sir, I apologize for the inappropriate attribution of that inane set of remarks to you. I have to admit it surprised me that something of that nature could come from you, particularly in light of the generally sensible posts I'm accustomed to seeing with your name. That post to which I was replying did, however, start out with " didn't get with 8 ..." The fact that Mr. Goodwin's format was so confusing as to throw me off at the same time he complained about my experimenting with the various formats people had suggested, doesn't help. It's interesting that you mention the Northwest Computer Products as a source, since I do seem to recall that they were the source of the '286/25 motherboard to which I referred. I bought this hardware from a local guy who took my list of items and reference prices and then set about to gather up all the pieces for me and then take a small profit on the work. That motherboard, as I previously indicated was a board complete with the IIT coprocessor and 4 MB of DIP ram, all provided by NCP (if that's the right outfit) and the remaining 4 MB of SIPP memory was from a local vendor who supplied many of the sellers who advertised in Computer Shopper, though he happily sold to us and anyone else who asked him, at the same prices as those he charged the mail-order vendors he supplied. The video board was a 1Kx768x16-color Genoa 5400, I believe (I saw the box earlier today, though I don't have the card any longer). Those were not cheap, but were readily obtainable if one had the connections, at a price on the order of $139 or so. The advertised price at the time was on the order of $199, but it wasn't unusual to find someone who wanted to sell them and would take $60 less just to turn their inventory. As I previously mentioned, we'd been designing with 25 MHz 'C286 processors since '87 or so, for the satcom biz. I designed ground equipment, but the selected Harris CPU was used in both ground and flight app's and it was so

widely avaialble that we didn't think anything about using it. The "official"

25 MHz part did come a bit later, but that was only a couple of years later, and really wasn't a die change or shrink. I think it was just a ground-rule change where the performance spec's were concerned. I took a look at the motherboard, BTW, and found that the C&T chips on the board were marked 20 MHz, but there's a sticker on the board that clearly says "25 MHz." This suggests the boards were selected for that rate. I don't know how you and your friends went about buying hardware back then. I shopped around because I didn't want to have to do it again. I didn't like paying more than 30% of retail prices, and seldom had to do that. I went back and checked the prices from Orca, and find their Q1 pricing on 1 MB SIMMs and SIPPs were, indeed, in the range of $35-37 at the time (September '89), as I have it penciled in the margin of their spec's. I did, after all, buy my

first '386 motherboard from them, and complete with RAM.