TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Glen Slick]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 8:23 PM, Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> Interesting.  HP made ISA card versions of early (or actually, pre-)
> HP9000-300 that were designated as "Basic Language Processors", hosting a
> 68000 and having GPIB I/O.  Interesting beasts. I believe that they were
> able to take control of the ISA bus for at least some functions; they were
> fast for their time, and it was easy to share GPIB-acquired data with the
> MSDOS world.

The HP 82324A coprocessor card wasn't an ISA bus master card. Software
running on the host PC implemented some of the I/O interface. When
software on the coprocessor card made some I/O accesses the
coprocessor card could be frozen while software running on the host PC
completed the I/O access.

Hewlett-Packard Journal, April 1992
http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1992-04.pdf
Page 110, A High-Performance Measurement Coprocessor for Personal Computers
This article describes the second and faster version of the card based
on the 68030.