tsc2597@acf4.UUCP (Sam Chin) (02/24/85)
---ddt I own a S-100 based micro with boards from Lomas Data Products. Does anyone else out in netland have a similiar machine. If so, I would like to discuss various upgrade options with them. For those unfamiliar with LDP, they are a competitor of Compupro. They sell S-100 boards and systems such as 10Mhz 8086 boards, 80286 boards, 3Mb dynamic ram boards etc and they support CPM/86, MSDOS 2.1 and Concurrent PC-DOS (hopefully UNIX soon). Recently, they came out with a 3 Mb dynamic ram board which works with a 10Mhz 8086 with no wait states. More interestingly, they have a S-100 board which emulates the video display of an IBM PC. It seems to be quite compatible to the point where they have an IBM PC keyboard interface on the display board. According to Rich Lomas, they have developed a version of MS-DOS 2.1 which runs PC-DOS programs. Amongst the ones they tried are dBaseII and Lotus 1-2-3 with graphics. Does any one know if Compupro came out with theirs and how compatible it is. I have had my system for 2 years and have been quite satisfied with their support. Upgrading this system is cheap - a 10Mb hard disk with controller and PS was only $900. Now for $500, I can get PC compatibility (I have 2 8" and 1 5 1/4" drive) through the graphics board (and retire my faithful 5 year old H-19). I have quite a lot of public domain stuff configured for my system and will be willing to share it. I have no connection with LDP other than being a customer. Sam Chin ARPAnet: tsc2597@nyu-acf4 uucp: allegra!cmcl2!acf4!tsc2597
CSTROM@SIMTEL20.ARPA (02/27/85)
I'm not presently a Lomas customer, but am quite interested in their recent announcements. Do you run their CCPM? Is it version 3.1? Does it offer PCMODE? I also wonder if the IBM graphics board is a real product, or does it only exist in the shop? I was hoping that there would be some alternatives to Dr. Bill's non-existent hardware and kludgey software, but I have not seen anything to give encouragement that Lomas is the answer to our prayers, just more hype. -Charlie
jchapman@watcgl.UUCP (john chapman) (02/27/85)
(extract) > they are a competitor of Compupro. They sell S-100 boards and systems such > as 10Mhz 8086 boards, 80286 boards, 3Mb dynamic ram boards etc and they > support CPM/86, MSDOS 2.1 and Concurrent PC-DOS (hopefully UNIX soon). > > Recently, they came out with a 3 Mb dynamic ram board which works with a > 10Mhz 8086 with no wait states. More interestingly, they have a S-100 board > Sam Chin I have seen this board advertised but I think people should be wary about rushing out and buying one even though they seem like a good deal. Last august I decided to add more memory to my machine and their 128k/256k dynamic memory board seemed like a good deal too. However having had previous (bad) experiences with dynamic boards for s100 machines I was wary. I have a Morrow hard disk controller which does dma so I called them up and specifically asked - Will this board function correctly with the Morrow HDC-DMA (just about as close to an exact quote as I can do)? Answer: YES. Reality: NO. I did not discover this immediately since all my other memory was static and it was not until I ran in a configuration where the Lomas board was being used as the target of the disk transfer that failure occurred. By this time the warranty had expired so I just sighed and went out and bought another static ram board (sound of toilet flushing). Even now I am tempted by both the price of their new board and the claims about it but dynamic just doesn't seem to work in a generic s100/IEEE696 environment. If anyone has had better experiences with dynamic memeory I would be pleased to know. All the boards I know of either don't do dma properly or are restictricted to particular cpu, etc etc. John Chapman Once warned, twice shy, but still optimistic.