Got my GRiD Compass 1101 working this week (got distracted from my
ASR-33 repair, what can I say, I'm easily distracted) -- replaced a
couple of bad RAM chips and it's up and running again. It boots to the
GRiD version of MS-DOS 2.00 from the internal bubble memory, so I've
been playing around with that a bit, digging through my old DOS archives
looking for stuff to run on it.
I can't find a single non-trivial DOS program that runs successfully on
it. This isn't altogether surprising as the Compass was never intended
to be a PC compatible machine, the MS-DOS port was an afterthought.
Still, it seems considerably less than useful. Which leads me to the
question -- what was the least PC-Compatible "MS-DOS" machine out there
back before "100% PC Compatible" was a thing?
The Compass has a lot going against it, as the only thing making it
close to PC compatible is the 8086 CPU -- everything else is completely
different (bitmapped display with no character modes, bubble memory for
internal storage, GPIB disk interface, a 70-something key keyboard
missing a lot of PC standard keys... I'm not sure about more esoteric
things like interrupt controllers, etc.) At least the disk controller
uses a standard 360K format compatible with the PC, so data interchange
was fairly straightforward...
What say you?
- Josh