TRW Acquisitions, VCF/building s100 systems

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Mon Feb 2 16:05:37 1998

<>They may work muost just pull the 360k drives from an XT.
<
< Aren't SA 400's single density? XT drives are Double Density. Yes,
<they'll probably work but the media wouldn't be interchangable.

Sa400 would do FM (single density) and MFM (double density). the 360k
drive also do single density. It's the 1.2m 5.25" drives that are weird.

< Do you have the old NS* software that will run on the Alrair?

By default yes.. and no. The stuff will run on an altair but the IO
which is personalized for my NS* with it's two serial ports. there
is no way I can personalize it for the altair as I have no clue of the
IO (serial boards used and their addreses). The NS* motherboard
(backplane) has two serial ports and a parallel port plus a few
other useful things so their configurations were easier to be certain
of. You need to track down a set of NS* manuals or copies.

FYI: NSdos requires a minimum 16k of ram starting at 2000h it does not
use ram below 2000h (or care). Also it assumes the ports start at 00
and the port devices are 8251s with hard jumpered baud rates.

If you are going to configure an altair you need manuals, more manuals
and it doesn't hurt to be able do digital design to understand what they
did. You see the docs with early altairs were not amoung the best. Most
of what you may need to know often had to be extracted from the printsets
by understanding the logic. then you have the non-altair boards plugged
in that manuals are very handy for too. If the boards require extra or
specific software (some terminal interface or video display boards) the
hadware and software manuals may be needed.

Allison
Received on Mon Feb 02 1998 - 16:05:37 GMT