OT: computer nostalgia (was RE: Rapid once deployed too)

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, May 05, 2006, Bob Stockler wrote:
>Ken Brody wrote (on Fri, May 05, 2006 at 04:41:34PM -0400):
>
>| Quoting Walter Vaughan (Fri, 05 May 2006 16:28:41 -0400):
>| 
>| > Kenneth Brody wrote:
>| > > (This assumes that my memory of it having 512K memory and 8MHz CPU is
>| > > accurate, of course.)
>| >
>| > As an owner of a running Tandy 16B with Profile16, I think that the
>| > memory is 768K in the card-cage. I'd have to fire it up this weekend
>| > to get the exact number. Maybe you are thinking that after the kernel
>| > and sundry OS services, the ProfileVM only had 512k left for itself
>| > and multiple users. I'm thinking a 6000 might have had 1024k.
>| 
>| I think the base model had 512K, and you could max it out to 1024K.
>| 
>| And Snapp had a 1MB add-on card, though I don't recall exactly how
>| that worked if 1MB was the max addressable.
>
>I thought I recalled that Snapp had a 1-Mb card (and that I'd
>gotten one), but I've written Tom Pancero (who worked for Snapp
>back then) for confirmation.

I think what Bob did was double the RAM on each board by soldering
additional RAM chips, piggybacking them on the board so you could get twice
as much RAM as Tandy allowed.

>Snapp also had a multi-terminal board (I think, and think it
>could allow 24 terminals to connect).

Bob built a monster ``Model 60000'' or some such, stuffing a bunch of
boards in an external chassis which was the size of s small refrigerator.

I did something similar to deal with hard drives.  I got tired of dealing
with Tandy's somewhat flakey hard drive enclosures with daisy chained
drives which could totally fry rather expensive controller boards if a
cable wasn't seated perfectly.  I stuck four 70MB drives in a full-height
tower chassis with the controller board mounted where the motherboard would
normally go, plugging this into the back of the Tandy 6000.  This ran
perfectly for several years.

Bill
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