World's Crappiest Drives (was Re: A&J Microdrive)

From: Iggy Drougge <optimus_at_canit.se>
Date: Tue Dec 12 11:40:55 2000

Tony Duell skrev:

>> Anyone familiar with this beast? It looked pretty cool. Could cards with
>> faster CPUs be installed in place of the 286 card?

>Quite likely. It was certainly possible on some Olivetti machines, which
>were also built on a passive backplane.

On the topic of ISA processor cards, does anyone have any experience with the
Victor model n? M111021002?
It's a miniscule 386 tower system, measuring approximately 30?10?30 cm. It's
got one of the most difficult disassemblies I've seen on a PC, with a three-
part outer shells which must be removed before disks or cards are crammed into
it. ISA cards are dropped, or rather hung, into the backplane at the bottom of
the computer, literally hanging upside down. The machine was delivered with an
ISA card which on first inspection looks like a VGA card, but with another
card piggybacked onto it, covering an 80386 processor and 30-pin SIMM slots.
The backplane is in turn connected to another card with IDE and floppy
connectors, IIRC. This forms a "motherboard" spread out on three cards, a
design necessitated by the form factor of the case, which is no wider than a
3,5" drive bay. The standard configuration also seems to contain some sort of
docking bay for a tape drive or something. They seem to crop up at fleamarkets
quite often.
Would a drop-in CPU replacement be possible on such a system, and have there
been 486 ISA cards manufactured?

--
En ligne avec Thor 2.6.
Goto: A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers to
complain about unstructured programmers.
Received on Tue Dec 12 2000 - 11:40:55 GMT

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