On Mon, 5 Aug 2019, Neil Cherry via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
On 8/4/19 6:16 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Why do this? Because of the rise of MS-DOS during the age of CP/M-80. Keep in mind that through the late 1970s and into the 1980's, CP/M-80 was the leading Intel-compatible operating system. These 8088 options were ways to provide some kind of compatibility and future-support, for MS-DOS products and for "Big Blue" IBM. The Z80 cards for IBM PC's, was a way to run legacy software - until PCs were fast enough to emulate CP/M-80.
Interesting time, I have an ATR8000 for the Atari 8 bit computer. The ATR8000 could run as a drive interface (8", 5 1/4 and 3 1/2) or CP/M machine or with a coprocessor board a 8088 and run DOS. A very odd time as no one knew what was going on with CP/M vs MSDOS.
I have a Kaypro 4Plus88 with an 8088 coprocssor board, as well as an Otrona Attache 8:16 with an 8086 coprocessor. Also, the museum's Telcon Zorba has the same SWP 8088 board as the Kaypro. One of the nice functions of these machines is that the extra RAM on the coprocessor board (usually 256KB) is available as a RAMdisk while running CP/M. Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/