NorthStar Horizon incoming

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Sun Jan 10 11:59:12 1999

Bruce,

FOLD THE LINES! MY screen is not 200 chars wide and I really hate
horozontal scrolling!


< Here's what I remember about Horizons: S100 bus, CP/M for an OS,
built pre
<

The native OS was NS* DOS not cp/m though there were several vendors of
CPM configured for horizon.

Generally they were z80/4mhz cpucard, MDS hard sector disk of 80k for the
older single density controller or up to 800k for the later DD controller.
Ram minimum for running NS*dos was 16k orged at 2000h while cpm required
20k(minimum and 56k max due to memory mapped disk controller). The s100
backplane was not IEEE696 complient but pretty close considering its design
window was many years earlier. The mackplane also carried the logic for two
serial ports, parallel port, interrupt logic and a heartbeat timer.

A minimum system could then be the box and three cards and the most often
cards added were ram. Theses systems use an external terminal though I'd
set mine up with a VDM-1 video card and a encoded parallel keyboard.

Another OS that ran on the NS* was UCSD PASCAL P-system. The basic system
for that required 48k ram and two floppy disks minimum and three(or four if
it was the DD version) were more useable.

Allison
Received on Sun Jan 10 1999 - 11:59:12 GMT