gil@jtsv16.UUCP (gil) (02/13/90)
I've recently read about the Intel Wildcard. Essentially it is supposed to be an XT on a card about the size of a postcard. Most of the motherboard h/w is on it. Does anyone have any experience with this product? It looks like an ideal platform for some sort of embedded controller.
wbeebe@rtmvax.UUCP (Bill Beebe) (02/17/90)
In article <1306@jtsv16.UUCP> gil@jtsv16.UUCP (gil) writes: > >I've recently read about the Intel Wildcard. Essentially it is >supposed to be an XT on a card about the size of a postcard. Most of >the motherboard h/w is on it. > >Does anyone have any experience with this product? It looks like an >ideal platform for some sort of embedded controller. You're a day late and a dollar short. Intel ceased production of the Wildcard in 1989, about one year after they anounced it. It came with the 80C88 and all PC peripheral chips and buffers on a card about half the size of a 5x7 notecard. You added SIMMS and other peripherals such as video and diskdrives to complete the picture. The card in quantity 10,000 was supposed to cost around $40. The real kicker was that a development system consisting of a motherboard with the simm socket necessary to support the Wildcard and up to three 256Kx9 simms was $699. As an Orlando Intel ATS I did my dead-level best to try and sell them, to no avail. Only one company, a video game company, showed enough interest to try and buy the development system. I don't know of any design wins in Florida, but in the Orlando/Melbourne/Tampa area it was an abismal failure. What I did discover that if anyone wanted to do embedded work that required a board that small then they designed a proprietary design, usually around the 80C186, if they wanted to use the 80X86 family. It was more flexible at the time to use the 80C186 and a special set of DOS in ROM for the 186. As long as standard DOS function calls were used (no direct hardware manipulation) it was quite practical.