North Star Horizon

From: Don Maslin <donm_at_cts.com>
Date: Fri May 15 23:12:44 1998

On Fri, 15 May 1998, Allison J Parent wrote:

>
> <[NS* terminal .vs. video board]
> <
> <Oh, agreed. The original Horizon configuration was to have a serial
> <terminal. I seem to recall a pair of 8251-based serial ports on the
> <motherboard, one of which was used for this.
>
> There was exactly that, two serial ports, a hearbeat interrupt and a
> parallel port. In the 78-81 time frame, most video cards were 64char
> and only some had decenders. Terminals onthe other hand were 80char,
> full upper/lowercase and generally required less software than a memory
> mapped display.
>
> <a serial port (and a standard MDA card), etc), I wondered if a Horizon co
> <be set up with an S100 video card as well. I guess it can.
>
> Most s100 crates could be...even a SOL could ahve more than one!
>
> <YEs, it does look to be a nice machine. One day, when I've got a few
> <minuts spare, I'll dig mine out again and look at it more seriously.
>
> After working with the Altairs noisy bus and toggling boot loaders
> it was a pleasure to see good signals and boot on reset. The IMSAI
> was a better machine than altair but when I moved up I really didn't want
> a front pannel and I needed more serial IO, the NS* box, CPU and the MDS I
> had in the altair solved most of my problems.
>
> CCS, compupro, altos, Vector and a few others had S100 boxen that were
> equal or better (compupro was really good!).
 
Altos, Allison? All of the ones that I have ever seen were essentially
single board computers.
                                                 - don
 
Received on Fri May 15 1998 - 23:12:44 BST

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