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#11
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Compaq Deskpro 386s20/n
Compaq had the QVision done, and then ATI had an EISA card for a while, but EISA
graphics were very quickly supplanted by first VL-bus then PCI. Few of the graphics companies at the time wanted to deal with the added complexity of EISA compared to ISA. Yeah, the Adaptec 1740 is pretty good. I ran an EISA SCSI 486 system with a Micronics motherboard as my main system for a while. The 3c579 is 10mbit only, no 100mbit capability. About a year ago, my Compaq EISA cards (convertible between Token Ring and Ethernet with a daughter card) made their journey to the electronic board scrapper. Compaq made the TR card and maybe one of the other companies specializing in TR did also. Like Proteon and Madge. IBM did not. EISA did outlive MicroChannel, which effectively bit the dust after 486s running at 50 and 66MHz. I don't think there ever was a Pentium with MicroChannel, was there? I don't think IBM ever did even a 100MHz 486 MCA system. EISA found its way onto Pentium Pro and Pentium II server class boxes, and DEC Alpha systems. I have the old PC Magazine issue with the Bus Wars article here somewhere. I saved many of the magazines with my articles in them. I also recall a trip with PC Mag down to Boca, where I raised the hackles of the MicroChannel people by telling them that the caching SCSI adapter controlled by an 80186 was terribly mismatched with a 386, and that the adapter looked like it was designed by accountants who found a lot of leftover 80186s and 30-pin SIMMs in a warehouse somewhere. Microchannel suffered from a lot of defects, but, along with EISA, paved the way for the notion of embedding self-identification PALs in a device, so software could easily tell what it was talking to. VL bus did not do this, and the Intel PC guys picked right up on the idea when I suggested it to them. After that, Plug and Play could become a reality. Of course, self-identification of devices was not a new idea. It simply came from the mainframe world where some of us worked in LARGE air-conditioned rooms with raised flooring. To give perspective, PC Magazine back then ran maybe 500 or 600 pages every two weeks, advertising computer boxes that cost thousands of dollars and monitors costing up to a grand. Today, PC Magazine is a skinny publication, made so by the internet ads and the lower prices of computers, incapable of sustaining the expensive ad cost structure... Ben Myers On Mon, 05 Mar 2007 04:49:56 GMT, "William R. Walsh" m wrote: Hi! EISA adapters for what? EISA graphics cards were not even close to being what they were cracked up to be. Compaq's QVision seems to be pretty darn respectable. I've run one of these in a 486DX2/66 EISA box and it was more than fast enough at the time. It also had a VRAM upgrade fitted, so it could manage high color at up to 1024x768 resolution. This 386DX/33 box has the same adapter, and the VRAM upgrade is present on it as well. EISA SCSI adapters were pretty respectable. I found a seemingly new in box Adaptec AHA-1740 adapter with all the docs and diskettes. Another preservation effort...image the disks and scan the docs... EISA network cards offered no advantage over ISA ones. Really? Oh well, the price was right right for the three 3C579-TPs I got ahold of. I do not think that there ever was an EISA 10/100 card, but 3COM produced its 3C515 10/100 ISA NIC. Hmmm...I don't know. Guess I'd be surprised if there wasn't, as EISA did hold on for a lot longer in the x86 world than MCA. I've heard of Pentium II machines that had EISA slots. I'd really like to find a real EISA Token Ring card. Wow, this takes me way back to the EISA versus MicroChannel article I worked on for PC Magazine. The 386/33 was a much nicer box in its time than IBM's ridiculously proprietary MicroChannel machines... Funny you'd mention that (got a copy of the article? I'd love to read it...wctatsignwalshcomptechdotcom) as I have quite the Microchannel collection: http://greyghost.dyndns.org/mcastuff/ http://www.walshcomptech.com/comp_coll.htm I guess you could say that I think microchannel was "insufficiently appreciated" in its day, although I can very easily see why that was. But they are rock solid reliable boxen... Oh, by the way, there does exist a 100Mbit Ethernet card for MCA-bus systems. Too bad it's a loosely converted ISA design and a joke from a reliability perspective... William |
#12
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Compaq Deskpro 386s20/n
Hi!
Compaq had the QVision done, and then ATI had an EISA card for a while ATI GUP/Mach32? I have one in Microchannel and thought I saw one in EISA at some time. I know PCI and VL-BUS versions also existed. I haven't found the Microchannel one to be worth the expense of owning it. The NT driver is marginal and the card itself is slooooow. IBM's own XGA-2 runs rings around it in high color modes, too bad Microsoft never saw fit to write a driver that could fully exploit the card. (At least these woes were resolved for Win9x users, thanks to the efforts of a third party with a Win95 DDK.) About a year ago, my Compaq EISA cards (convertible between Token Ring and Ethernet with a daughter card) made their journey to the electronic board scrapper. Gaaaak! I'm astounded to learn that Compaq had anything to do with TR that they actually made. However, I do have some TR PCI cards that are IBM made and "Compaq" branded. EISA did outlive MicroChannel, which effectively bit the dust after 486s running at 50 and 66MHz. I don't think there ever was a Pentium with MicroChannel, was there? Officially there were the Server 95 systems that came in Pentium 60 and 66MHz versions. The PC Server 500 (using the same planar as the Server 95 but a different case) featured a processor complex using a 90MHz Pentium CPU. The 90MHz processor complex has been pushed to 233MHz MMX with varying results, although 200MHz is easily obtained and stable. The PC Servers 5xx and 720 were Pentium based systems with an MCA bus. In the case of the 720, the system was a combination PCI/MCA unit. There also exist MCA versions of the PC Server 3xx series and some 688* desktops with "Select A Bus". The 720 was capable of six-way SMP at up to 200MHz per processor card. I have a Server 95a (the last PS/2 model) with a 90MHz Pentium processor complex that's been rewired to accept a Pentium Overdrive 200 (run at 180) MMX CPU. This thing is every bit of seriously sweet to use. There were some Pentium fired NCR MCA-based servers. Nobody's ever seen one that I know of. I don't think IBM ever did even a 100MHz 486 MCA system. They sure did. Models 76 and 77, both built around the "Lacuna" board either came with or had everything you needed to run a 3.3V 486 CPU. These (and the NCR 3350, which I also have) will take a Pentium OverDrive 63/83 and have an L2 cache slot. Other 486 systems (like the Server 85 "X" models) don't take a POD but will stand a 486-compatible upgrade, including the 133MHz AMD 486 chips. The 8570-Bxx series machines were available with a "486 Power Platform" running at 25MHz. It's been said that these were the first 486 computers ever marketed. They are rare to say the least. Reports say that with some diddling around, an AMD 486/133 processor upgrade works on them as well. There were other models, many of which I have. If you didn't look at my computer collection, you might want to. It's somewhat outdated in parts, but I'm working on redoing it to feature all of the stuff I have. When MCA had died off in the x86 world, it continued for another little while in the RS/6000 world. I don't have any of those. where I raised the hackles of the MicroChannel people by telling them that the caching SCSI adapter controlled by an 80186 was terribly mismatched with a 386, and that the adapter looked like it was designed by accountants who found a lot of leftover 80186s and 30-pin SIMMs in a warehouse somewhere. Interesting. I did find with some benchmarking experiments that the short late uncached (and 80C32 based) IBM MCA SCSI adapter was much faster than the 80188 based caching ones. I've never been sure why, perhaps it was better code optimization for the 80C32 microcontroller. Still, 8X CD burning is possible on a 486 with this SCSI subsystem running the hard disks and an NCR 53C710 driving the burner. I'd have to say IBM did a good job with these in some ways, because I have a 9585 "X" machine with onboard cached SCSI that is happily driving a 50GB Seagate SCA disk in a 3510 enclosure under Windows NT 4.0. The boot-BIOS seems to only go up to 8GB, but an OS with drivers that take over will do fine. The so-called fast/wide adapters lost the cache and went with an 80186 clocked at 20MHz. These things haul...burning a CD at 12X is easy to do as long as the hard disk can keep up. I've clocked this doing 10.1MB/sec transfer. A later version with wide SE on the inside and external HVD goes even faster (14.1MB/sec!). That one is driven by a 40MHz (!!!) 80186. These adapters have been used to drive 250GB hard disks without incident. To give perspective, PC Magazine back then ran maybe 500 or 600 pages every two weeks, advertising computer boxes that cost thousands of dollars and monitors costing up to a grand. I remember those days and loved PC Magazine at the time. I was almost too late to that particular time frame, but I was there and reading the magazine. Too bad it isn't that way any more, although I don't think it would still be here without having slimmed down as it did. I also remember the days when Computer Shopper was a huge thing that could probably have been used to defend yourself if need be! Gosh, did that sound like an IBM commercial of some sort? :-) Sorry for the rambling! William |
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Compaq Deskpro 386s20/n
You got into MicroChannel a lot more than I did, and you have the real hardware
there to reinforce your memory. I forgot about the later hot-running Socket 4 Pentium boxes and the Pentium OverDrive. I may still have a Pentium OverDrive kicking around here. 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. It's possible someone else manufactured the Compaq EISA Ethernet/Token Ring card for the Paq. It was certainly odd, with a little daughter card that attached to give it one or the other network personality. NCR was the other major player in MicroChannel, to the extent that NCR brand systems were sold with MicroChannel boards inside. But NCR hedged its bets with ISA and EISA systems, too. A lot of good that did them. One of my ex-bosses from many years gone by was Pres of NCR for a while. He made his own unique contribution to their demise as a computer name brand, and the NCR product lines and product direction reflected his own chronic indecisiveness. My benchmark tests (saturating the subsystem with I/O operations) showed that the non-cached MCA SCSI adapter had more throughput than the 80188 cached one. That's what led me to the assertion that really ****ed off the IBM MicroChannel guys. 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. Was the on-board 80188 a screaming 12MHz? IBM apparently recovered from the experience with a faster controller, comparable, in fact, to the SCSI HBA used by mainstream Adaptec, who also did a 1640 MCA SCSI host adapter... Ben Myers On Mon, 05 Mar 2007 06:55:40 GMT, "William R. Walsh" m wrote: Hi! Compaq had the QVision done, and then ATI had an EISA card for a while ATI GUP/Mach32? I have one in Microchannel and thought I saw one in EISA at some time. I know PCI and VL-BUS versions also existed. I haven't found the Microchannel one to be worth the expense of owning it. The NT driver is marginal and the card itself is slooooow. IBM's own XGA-2 runs rings around it in high color modes, too bad Microsoft never saw fit to write a driver that could fully exploit the card. (At least these woes were resolved for Win9x users, thanks to the efforts of a third party with a Win95 DDK.) About a year ago, my Compaq EISA cards (convertible between Token Ring and Ethernet with a daughter card) made their journey to the electronic board scrapper. Gaaaak! I'm astounded to learn that Compaq had anything to do with TR that they actually made. However, I do have some TR PCI cards that are IBM made and "Compaq" branded. EISA did outlive MicroChannel, which effectively bit the dust after 486s running at 50 and 66MHz. I don't think there ever was a Pentium with MicroChannel, was there? Officially there were the Server 95 systems that came in Pentium 60 and 66MHz versions. The PC Server 500 (using the same planar as the Server 95 but a different case) featured a processor complex using a 90MHz Pentium CPU. The 90MHz processor complex has been pushed to 233MHz MMX with varying results, although 200MHz is easily obtained and stable. The PC Servers 5xx and 720 were Pentium based systems with an MCA bus. In the case of the 720, the system was a combination PCI/MCA unit. There also exist MCA versions of the PC Server 3xx series and some 688* desktops with "Select A Bus". The 720 was capable of six-way SMP at up to 200MHz per processor card. I have a Server 95a (the last PS/2 model) with a 90MHz Pentium processor complex that's been rewired to accept a Pentium Overdrive 200 (run at 180) MMX CPU. This thing is every bit of seriously sweet to use. There were some Pentium fired NCR MCA-based servers. Nobody's ever seen one that I know of. I don't think IBM ever did even a 100MHz 486 MCA system. They sure did. Models 76 and 77, both built around the "Lacuna" board either came with or had everything you needed to run a 3.3V 486 CPU. These (and the NCR 3350, which I also have) will take a Pentium OverDrive 63/83 and have an L2 cache slot. Other 486 systems (like the Server 85 "X" models) don't take a POD but will stand a 486-compatible upgrade, including the 133MHz AMD 486 chips. The 8570-Bxx series machines were available with a "486 Power Platform" running at 25MHz. It's been said that these were the first 486 computers ever marketed. They are rare to say the least. Reports say that with some diddling around, an AMD 486/133 processor upgrade works on them as well. There were other models, many of which I have. If you didn't look at my computer collection, you might want to. It's somewhat outdated in parts, but I'm working on redoing it to feature all of the stuff I have. When MCA had died off in the x86 world, it continued for another little while in the RS/6000 world. I don't have any of those. where I raised the hackles of the MicroChannel people by telling them that the caching SCSI adapter controlled by an 80186 was terribly mismatched with a 386, and that the adapter looked like it was designed by accountants who found a lot of leftover 80186s and 30-pin SIMMs in a warehouse somewhere. Interesting. I did find with some benchmarking experiments that the short late uncached (and 80C32 based) IBM MCA SCSI adapter was much faster than the 80188 based caching ones. I've never been sure why, perhaps it was better code optimization for the 80C32 microcontroller. Still, 8X CD burning is possible on a 486 with this SCSI subsystem running the hard disks and an NCR 53C710 driving the burner. I'd have to say IBM did a good job with these in some ways, because I have a 9585 "X" machine with onboard cached SCSI that is happily driving a 50GB Seagate SCA disk in a 3510 enclosure under Windows NT 4.0. The boot-BIOS seems to only go up to 8GB, but an OS with drivers that take over will do fine. The so-called fast/wide adapters lost the cache and went with an 80186 clocked at 20MHz. These things haul...burning a CD at 12X is easy to do as long as the hard disk can keep up. I've clocked this doing 10.1MB/sec transfer. A later version with wide SE on the inside and external HVD goes even faster (14.1MB/sec!). That one is driven by a 40MHz (!!!) 80186. These adapters have been used to drive 250GB hard disks without incident. To give perspective, PC Magazine back then ran maybe 500 or 600 pages every two weeks, advertising computer boxes that cost thousands of dollars and monitors costing up to a grand. I remember those days and loved PC Magazine at the time. I was almost too late to that particular time frame, but I was there and reading the magazine. Too bad it isn't that way any more, although I don't think it would still be here without having slimmed down as it did. I also remember the days when Computer Shopper was a huge thing that could probably have been used to defend yourself if need be! Gosh, did that sound like an IBM commercial of some sort? :-) Sorry for the rambling! William |
#14
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Compaq Deskpro 386s20/n
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 |
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