x86 junk, AT/370 boards, etc. (was Re: printer socket (Off topic))

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Sun Sep 20 21:03:13 1998

Tony Duell wrote:
> I seem to remember that the charter for this list states that the only
> criterion for a machine to be classic is that it is over 10 years old.
> And that PCs over 10 years old are on-topic here.

You're right! I should have paid more attention to the NAQ list.
I guess there's simply no refuge from x86 PCs; they invade every newsgroup
and mailing list. Not to mention surplus stores; it's getting very hard
to find anything interesting because the places are completely overrun
with PC crap. As if anyone really wants huge piles of off-brand EGA cards
(or any EGA cards), ARCnet cards, etc. Sigh.

The only halfway interesting PC-based hardware I've ever found surplus are
the XT/370 and AT/370 board sets, and I've never gotten the software for
them. If anyone wants them, though, I think Timeline is still advertising
them. Be forewarned, however, that they are mapped to the 512K-640K
memory address range, so they won't work unless you have a motherboard that
can be configured to NOT provide memory in that range.

These boards contained three processors, a custom-microcoded 68000 variant
to implement the core 370 instruction set, a standard 68000 to implement
the instructions that wouldn't fit in the microcode of the first one, and
a custom version of the 8087 hacked to do IBM radix-16 floating point
instead of IEEE.

Too bad no technical docs were ever available, it would be fun to port
Linux to them.
Received on Sun Sep 20 1998 - 21:03:13 BST