[rescue] VAX CPU Board on ebay

[Michael Schiller]

On Sunday, January 26, 2003, at 05:14 AM, Somebody wrote:

>> Dude, it must be a CPU, it's on the m0b0!

I have (or possibly it's had by now) an issue of S-100 Microcomputing 
that had an article about the soon to be released IBM-PC, and one of 
the predictions in that article were that the machine would fail 
miserably in the marketplace specifically because the CPU was on the 
motherboard, and therefore not easily upgradable! Back then on the 
S-100 buss machines the mobo was what might now be called a 
daughterboard, it simply had a connection for the power supply, and a 
bunch of S-100 card slots on it. You want an 8080 CPU, you get an S-100 
card with one. You want a 6800 CPU, you get a card with that CPU on it, 
etc. etc.

Back then I had a Northstar Horizon that somebody else had assembled 
from kit form, so it only had 6 of the possible 12 connectors soldered 
in. Really nice machine, I had a Northstar Z80 CPU card in it, a 
Northstar 32k dynamic RAM card, 2 16k CompuPro static RAM cards, a 
Northstar floppy disk controller card, and a DC Hayes MicroModem 100 
card (300bps Bell103 compatible modem card that could be pushed to 
450bps, the 'other' S-100 modem made by PMMI (Potomac Micro Magic Inc.) 
was the speed demon, it could be pushed up to 600bps!)

The machine ran CP/M 2.2 within 56k of memory (the upper 8k couldn't be 
used due to the Northstar disk controller needing some memory space), 
and I ran WordStar, a custom database program, and a few other apps 
without a hitch.
-Mike
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