Hi!

You got into MicroChannel a lot more than I did, and
you have the real hardware there to reinforce your
memory.

Yeah...when in school, I saw and used Model 25s (286/XT) that remote-
booted from an Advanced Netware 286 (!!) server OS running on a Model
80. (Why they used the 286 version I can only guess...)

I liked the machines then, and wanted to have one. In 1997 I finally
got a Model 70 and nothing's been quite the same since. Of course,
when the school finally got done with all of this stuff in the early
2000s, they called me before taking it all away to be recycled. They
had one big pickup truck bed's worth before I got there.

When I got done, they had nothing to take. :-)

For a while, I sold hand-assembled 486 upgrade kits
built around the AMD Am486-133 133MHz 486 workalike.
Never got to try one in an IBM box. It probably
would not have worked.

Bah. :-) I've got some from Evergreen and Kingston. They all work
great. Some early processor complexes did have problems, though.

It was certainly odd, with a little daughter
card that attached to give it one or the
other network personality.

Now I'm going to have to look for one of those. :-) It'll go along
well with my 487SX and other "weird stuff".

(NCR stuff)

I've found the 3350 to be an interesting box. It's surprisingly
capable in some ways and lacking in others. The 77C22E video subsystem
is very capable per what spec sheets I've found...the drivers never
took advantage of all it could do.

The 80188 bandwidth was too narrow, and could
not run fast enough to do all the necessary
management of cached blocks while still meeting
the demand requests of the software on the
motherboard.

I've always wondered why the 80C32 cacheless controllers did so much
better on benchmarks. Thanks for that info.

The 80188 started running at 10MHz and later moved up to 16MHz on the
latest revision of the card. The Adaptec 1640--for having an annoying
1GB limit and only using a 16-bit slot--is definitely faster on just
about every hard disk benchmark I ever tried.

Hey, it's been great having this discussion, even if it's not strictly
Compaq related. If you should find those PC Magazine articles and
wouldn't mind passing a copy on, I'd love to see them.

William