Lee,
My first system with disk was Altair box NS* disk and 48K ram
and that was 1977.? FYI the NS disk was Sa400 35 tracks,
10 hard sectors and the boot disk has about 81K of usable space.?
Since the altair backpland and from panel were on a good day
flakey and only got worse with Z80....
?
Next system was Northstar Horizon crate.? Good backplane,
two serial ports, one parallel and 56K of ram and the NS* floppy
controller.? That would go from hard sector to softsector using
d765 and to 64K ram.? less than a year later St506 (5mb) and
soon after quantum D540 31mb. Boot was from eprom.
?
Multiple generations later...
?
The Compupro based in a new Northstar horizon box was
created to get the most possible out of CP/M.? It still lives.
That has many CPUs with slave cards and other smart
hardware support. by 1985 it had more resources than
the then average PC.
?
Actually the whole 20 CP/M systems still live and work as?
desired.
?
Needless to say there were many generations of BIOS to suit
hardware and support expanding ideas.? I did it to get
performance and avoiding the bag on the side 8088.
I managed to stay out of PC until the mid 90s networking
was the inflection point.
?
?
Allison
