What's your coolest ISA card? PC/370 ???

From: Heinz Wolter <h.wolter_at_sympatico.ca>
Date: Tue Aug 7 23:36:01 2001

I don't unfortunately have one... but the IBM ISA card
available for the XT allowed that lowly machine to
pretend it was a 370 class mainframe....in the early 80's
(I worked for a company that got all the latest IBM wonders...)

PC/370 it was called if I remember correctly....
made with IBM re-microprogrammed 68K silicon..
Later more powerful (5-7 mips) versions came out
for MC ad PCI named PC/390 after the ES series mainframes.

Tthe lowly XT, with it's MFM 10 meg drive would IPL the real
machine and act as a channel processor, DASD (disk), and 3278 I/O.
In other words, what Intel chips were meant to do, and no more!

That same company also had a beautiful real 68k based
IBM Instruments Scientifc (unix) computer... too bad IBM opted
for the Intel platform instead, punishing us forever to
a world of 64k segments, crappy architecture, small
medium, large and linear model compilers, Messy-DOS,
Winblows and all it's breathern... when we might have
have 68Ks and unix...It would have been a different world.
Thanks IBM!

Anyone have either an IBM Instruments Scientific Computer or PC/370
card ? Both are rare, while PC/390 systems come up on ebay sometimes...

Heinz
Received on Tue Aug 07 2001 - 23:36:01 BST