Date   : Fri, 15 Jun 1990 19:42:04 GMT
From   : crash!mwilson@nosc.mil (Marc Wilson)
Subject: Compupro Selector Channel

In article <30688@cup.portal.com> John_A_Pham@cup.portal.com writes:
>
>    I bought this card over the weekends, so now I'm trying to look for 
>some documentation.  The on board rom has a marking "boot 8080 or 8086",
>does this mean that this board can be use to boot up either CPM-80 or CPM-86
>disk?  
> 
>    Does anyone know if Compupro is still in business? 

     What you have here is half of a Compupro Disk 2 HD controller.  Their
first one was a two-board set, the DISK 2 and the SELECTOR CHANNEL.

     I'm a bit hazy about the function of ech board of the pair, but the
DISK 2 board carries the connectors for the hard drive(s).

     The ROM on the SELECTOR CHANNEL will appear at your processor reset
address, wherever that happens to be.

     You do NOT need the CPU 85/88, contrary to what someone else has said.
The board has a jumper contolling which half of the ROM is enabled.  Set it
one way, and the boot routine is 8-bit ( i.e. 8080 ).  Set it the other way
and you have a 16-bit boot.

     The SELECTOR CHANNEL board was the smarts for the board set.  It's a
channel controller, like the IBM mainframes.  You leave it commands in
memory, then bump its attention port.  This caused it to come out, get the
IOPB ( I/O parameter Block ), and tell the controller what to do.

     It's an IEEE DMA device, capable of transferring 64k of data at a time,
across 64k boundaries.  Supposedly pretty fast, too.

     Oh, this beast was a SA-1000 ( 8" ) controller, not ST-506 compatible
( although you supposedly could get CompuPro to fix you up one that was
ST-506 ).

     Compupro is Viasyn now.  No buyout, or anything like that... they just
changed their name.  They can be reached at 415-782-2481.

     Note that they no longer manufacture the board, and that their current
operating systems no longer support it ( except for CP/M-80 ).

     I have no connection with Compupro/Viasyn other than being a very
satisfied customer.  My S-100 is all Compupro.
-- 
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Marc Wilson
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