Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!dg!rec
From: rec@dg.dg.com (Robert Cousins)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: IBM PC prehistory (was Japanese Jos
Message-ID: <244@dg.dg.com>
Date: 28 Dec 89 13:41:03 GMT
References: <21559@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <76700097@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <47021@sgi.sgi.com> <1957@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Reply-To: uunet!dg!rec (Robert Cousins)
Organization: Data General, Westboro, MA.
Lines: 37

In article <1957@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) writes:
>  I'm most surprized at the parity. They was IBM's big contribution to
>PC technology. Up to then all the PCs were just 8 bits, and most of us
>who wanted reliability ran static RAM instead of dynamic. I still have
>an S100 system with about 1.5MB of CMOS static in 4Kx8 packages as I
>recall. Same pinout as a 32k ROM, allowing installation of firmware as
>desired.
>-- 
>bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
>"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
>'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
>that the world is flat!" - anon

There were a number of S-100 machines which had parity or ECC on them.
Piceon sold an ECC memory card which was pretty nice as I recall.  Aside
from that, a large number of other machines had parity memory. Some names
which come to mind include CSI, MuSys, Earth, and CCS.

Your machine sounds as if it is a Compupro.  Bill Godbout was always
arguing for static RAM over DRAM.  Is Compupro still around? They had
one of the first systems which could run either CP/M or CP/M 86 software.
Their CPU card had both an 8085 and an 8088 on it and was rigged to allow
the CPUs to alternate. Rumor has it that it was this platform which was
used by IBM to develop the code for the PC ROMs and by Microsoft to develop
MS-DOS for the PC.  The rumor continues that several of the peripheral chip
choices on the PC (such as the floppy disk controller chip) were made to
be compatible with the Compupro.
 
On a slightly different note, since we are talking about ancient history,
what was the name of the guy at Seattle Computer who wrote MS-DOS before
it was sold to Microsoft?

Robert Cousins
Dept. Mgr, Workstation Dev't.
Data General Corp.

Speaking for myself alone.