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IMSAI Series Two
Dino writes "You can actually pre-order a new IMSAI here. These folks bought the rights to produce the IMSAI in the late seventies, and provided the unit used in Wargames. It has a genuine S100 bus, but also has modern features as well, the most interesting being a driver that will allow you to access an ATX motherboard via the parallel port as a disk drive."
I see that they're offering it for a kilobuck...remember when that was the price of a 64K Ithaca Intersystems S100 bus RAM card kit?
If you had read the specs you would know it does support Linux.... The PC software support includes a small software "server" that uses the native DOS/Windows/Linux file system to store files.
No, it doesn't support linix as an OS, but uses a parallel port to use an ATX motherboard using Linux as a disk drive.
The revolution will be televised. Blackout restrictions apply.
I'm also not in the least bit interested in this IMSAI toy, in part because it's useless. Stick me in the "whatever floats your boat" camp along with the guy you're responding to.
What you don't seem to understand is that the phrase "unwashed masses" is generally used sarcastically, to mock people who have an elitist attitude like yours. "Carpetbagger" is used similarly nowadays, to mock the unreasonably resentful. You can't imagine how amusing it is to see you use both terms without a trace of sarcasm.
Check it out: it even has sounds
http://www.sciflicks.com/wargames/
I suspect that was the video chip in the TI 99-4, and later the 4/A. (which added an amazing, high-tech feature... lower case! :-) )
My memory may be wrong here, too. I keep thinking "TMS9900"... I wonder if the 99/4 used a lower-cost version of the chip you mention?
And yes it was a cool chip, but the interface to the CPU was a byte-wide gate with a toggle bit somewhere... 'there's new data for you'. Then you'd have to load another byte and flip the toggle, and load another byte and flip the toggle.
This pretty much killed the machine for any real gaming, although the chipset was powerful enough to do quite a bit of disconnected work. Sprites were the big thing on this chip... you could have 32 of them, all in automatic motion with collision detection. But it really didn't do bitmap-addressable graphics in any mode that was easily reachable to an ordinary programmer. Instead, it used character maps.... redefine what an A looks like and sprinkle them on the screen to make pictures. This was painful.
The main CPU was 3.54 mhz, 16-bit.... not very EFFICIENT, but still pretty fast even so. Hardware multiply and divide. If the gateway to video RAM had been anything reasonable, and if the bitmap graphics had been easier to get to (it DID have them, they were just deeply buried) the machine would have kicked serious ass.
If I remember the story correctly, the actor who played the professor also supplied the source for the "synth" voice. They had him read a whole series of words (not in the order they were said in the movie), and filtered them. Then they chopped and re-ordered them as needed for the lines required. This gave the choppy feel, while the filtering gave the "synth" feel.
...I think Z-System, a CP/M-compatible operating system for Z80's that was made in the '80s, could indeed handle as much RAM as you'd managed to make the system address. I ran it on a TRS-80 Model 4 that had a processor upgrade card on it that used a HD64180, a relative of the Z180, and 384K of RAM. Hey, you laugh, but for a while I ran a BBS on it--since I could load the entire OS, BBS software and database indexes for 800+ messages into RAM, it ran faster than a lot of the PC BBS's of the day.
The "new IMSAI" looks like a machine I'd have loved about a decade ago, back when some ex-CP/M hackers had designed a Z180-based Z-System machine on a Baby-AT motherboard that used the XT bus. As I recall the official name was the "PC-Z" but they referred to it informally as the "Grudge." (Which of course led to someone suggest they should make a portable version and call it the "Pet Peeve.")
No, as fond as I am of reminiscing, I don't think I'll buy a new IMSAI, in case anyone asks. If I ever miss the old days, I break out a TRS-80 emulator, play a few rounds of an arcade game in its glorious 128x48 resolution, and remember that even if people pushed hardware to the limit those days in a way that they don't now, that doesn't mean it'd be much fun to go back.
You get a nice built in keyboard, an lcd display,
and it'll sync up to your real computer.
From there you can program your Z80 in assy, C, or basic. Heck, you can even download a basic interpretter onto your little palm-top/pda.
Experience the joys of accessing memory, indirectly indexing, and jumping back and forth.
And save $900 in the process!
So yeah, this is cute, but as dumb as a box of rocks. You can get those microprocessor notebook-style trainers for a couple of hundred bucks (check mouser.com ), not 9!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Back in the days when Apple ][s and TRS-80s ruled mass-market computing, and MS-BASIC ruled ROM, S100 bus computers running CP/M were "open standards" machines of the day.
S100 bus machine CPUs were on a card, so S100 bus machines were NOT all binary-compatible with each other. But if you had an 8080 CPU card, a S100 bus, and CP/M as the operating system, that was about as "standard" as it got for microcomputers available from multiple vendors.