hale@motown.Allied.COM (Greg Hale) (07/13/90)
I'm looking for information and/or feedback from anyone who has/knows
about the various add-on boards for older PCs. This is to upgrade an
old IBM PC/XT.
In particular, we're interested in some things called:
+ Orchid Tiny Turbo 286
+ Charge Card 286
+ Intel 386 PC board
Anybody have any experience with any of these? Can any/all of the be
installed in an XT? If these things are so great, why don't people buy
more of them instead of buying new machines? Can you add multiple megs
of memory after one of these is installed?
Any help will be greatly appreciated!
NOTE: This is being posted for a friend who has no news access.
Please respond by email to:
hale@Allied.COM -- aka --
{att,bellcore,clyde,princeton,rutgers}!motown!halehiebeler@heretic.lanl.gov (David Hiebeler) (07/15/90)
In article <2069@motown.Allied.COM> hale@motown.Allied.COM (Greg Hale) writes: > I'm looking for information and/or feedback from anyone who has/knows > about the various add-on boards for older PCs. This is to upgrade an > old IBM PC/XT. Although this isn't one of the specified types of add-on boards the author of the article mentioned, I thought it still may be of interest to some. I have an XT clone with one board in it to really supercharge it. That board is a CAM (Cellular Automata Machine). Cellular automata are discrete dynamical systems (some people call them iterative arrays), that are being used these days to model various types of physical phenomena such as fluid dynamics, chemical oscillatory reactions, population dynamics, wave propagation through inhomogenous media, etc etc (the list keeps growing). So anyways, I've got this CAM in my XT. It costs a little less than $2000, but gives you performance competetive with the earlier Crays for performing cellular automata simulations (60 frames/sec, so the simulations actually run in real-time). I should add a disclaimer here -- I've been using this board for a few years now, and liked it so much that I'm now involved with the company that is currently producing them. But that was the order I went in (i.e. I work with the company because I like the board; it's not that I like the board because I work for the company). :-) Write to: Automatrix, Inc. P.O. Box 196 Rexford, NY 12148 or you could try their e-mail path: ...!crdgw1!automtrx!campc or automtrx!campc@crdgw1.ge.com They're producing a board called CAM-PC, which is a souped-up version of CAM-6. CAM-6 is described in "Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling", by Toffoli and Margolus (MIT Press, 1987). -- Dave Hiebeler | Internet: hiebeler@heretic.lanl.gov Complex Systems Group | Bitnet: userF3JL@rpitsmts MS B213, Theoretical Division | UUCP: crdgw1!automtrx!hiebeler Los Alamos National Laboratory / Los Alamos, NM 87545 USA
besler@cetus.mi.org (Brent H. Besler) (07/16/90)
Since you mentioned that you have an XT, I am pretty sure it has the standard 7 slot layout. If so, I would put in a 286 or 386SX motherboard. Believe it or not you can use most of the old cards in the higher speed boards, mostly sine the bus speeds are usually 8 Mhz. I have had good luck with a number of old XT clone cards in a Jameco 386 20 Mhz motherboard.