Well, I feel the same way about Apples. I mean, I find Apple IIs as
boring as any PC XT. And both are quite common. I sometimes find
various PC clone models interesting, but not very. But about these
370 cards, am I to understand they're normal PCs that can also act
like 370s?
>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.
>
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Received on Mon Sep 21 1998 - 16:39:56 BST