Subject: IBM PC hacking From: jim stephens <jwstephens at msm.umr.edu> Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 17:06:49 -0700 To: cctalk at classiccmp.org I saw an auction which reminded me of the days when the PC and XT came out, but before clones or otherwise appeared, and before such as AST were dominating the market. This auction is for a "zukerboard" 576K mem expansion. 6801436037. I remember the hype for zucker that they were going to wreck the market. The only reason this has any significance is that I believe this was one of the AST wannabe's, or even was larger than AST, pre the days when they started making systems. I know of at least Zucker, Tecmar (marty tech, I don't remember marty's last name, but he was some sort of PHD ohio type, I think). A number of companies were based here in Orange County, California, and provided a lot of cheap stuff as they cratered, and the local scrappers got their. stuff and sold it off. Processor Technology (? I think) went big time and cratered. I remember a little shop here in Santa Ana which had the first clone of the IBM PC. It was a single board which had 640k memory, allowed using 64k memories, instead of the 16K memory that the PC and XT earlier models used. It was called "Superboard" and was no relation to Supermicro, which came much later. It had a bios that usually worked, but also had, conveniently, a spot for up to 6 eprom chips, so you could put in a PC bios if you could get a copy. The PC used either EProms, (16K I think) and the Roms that were shipped with the BIOS were registered. The standard Data I/O would not read them since they were not programmable, and needed their output enabled to read the data. But once someone had them in the 2716's, it was easy to get them running in your superboard. First systems had a 63 watt P/S, and IBM cards if you could find them for video. Also there was no floppy controller on the first board. Maybe others of you can recall expansion card makers, of such things as serial, parallel, memory, floppy, then hard drive, etc. Jim