On Sunday 17 April 2005 7:20 pm, you wrote:
That's right. I've got one inherited from my brother. It used to run an early GUI called GEM. Though it had DOS-6 last time I looked. It was upgraded with a thing called a hard-card - an ISA card with a 20M hard drive for motherboards without an IDE socket. It worked surprisingly well. At some point I should wack it into an old motherboard with an ISA slot and see if it boots.
Yes Hard Cards and GEM, I remember those (GEM was a digital reseach project, that was very similar to what was used on the Atari ST) GEM was for a while a little bit ahead of Windows until version 3.11 which overtook it but had more severe system requirements (Win 3.11 wouldn't run on a PC1512 or in fact any 8086/8088 machine AFAIK)
The other benefit of hard cards was that (at the time) there were a confusing number of different controllers (RLL/MFM and some others I can't recall) and you had to match the drive to the controller (I seem to remember a few of them being interchangeable) and then low level format the drive on the type of controller card you wanted to use (anybody here still have those debug commands stuck in their head) So by putting the drive and controller card on a fat ISA hardcard you could avoid lots of messing about and just slot something in that gave you 20MB or whatever, Plug and Play (well as close as you could get in those days anyway)