After posting on another forum about my haul of IBM type 25's, another member mentions his storage locker finds. Most of which aren't very relevant here but there was on thing that caught my eye. He had, what he claimed was a 8 bit isa 286 accelerator board. After posting some pictures, it was revealed it was actually a 186. Long story short, I bought him a 6-pack and paid for shipping from Australia and it arrived! ($40 total)
I must say, i am quite beside myself. Personally, the MOST valuable parts have to be the manual and disk with the software. Its funny. Just a month ago, I had ZERO intention of putting together a 8086 system (my 386 does fine). Now I have 5 of them, and I'm starting to collect parts to pimp one out. If the manual can be believed, the 186 does NOT turn off the main cpu. it just does work and leaves the I/O to the original processor. Also, it tells me that the 186 has its own ram, and the ram on the motherboard can mostly be made into a ramdisk, or as a print spool, disk cache or what have you. According to the jumpers, the card has 640kb installed. This board is CLEAN. Like it was only used once clean.
That said, is there some sort of database for this sort of stuff? I'd be more than happy to grab a thrift store scanner, and copy the manual if it hasn't already been done. Naturally a dump of the bios and a floppy image. One of these days here soon, i'm going to have to test it out. I have like 5 pans in the fire at the moment that I've been putting off. (who here doesn't? )
I must say, i am quite beside myself. Personally, the MOST valuable parts have to be the manual and disk with the software. Its funny. Just a month ago, I had ZERO intention of putting together a 8086 system (my 386 does fine). Now I have 5 of them, and I'm starting to collect parts to pimp one out. If the manual can be believed, the 186 does NOT turn off the main cpu. it just does work and leaves the I/O to the original processor. Also, it tells me that the 186 has its own ram, and the ram on the motherboard can mostly be made into a ramdisk, or as a print spool, disk cache or what have you. According to the jumpers, the card has 640kb installed. This board is CLEAN. Like it was only used once clean.
That said, is there some sort of database for this sort of stuff? I'd be more than happy to grab a thrift store scanner, and copy the manual if it hasn't already been done. Naturally a dump of the bios and a floppy image. One of these days here soon, i'm going to have to test it out. I have like 5 pans in the fire at the moment that I've been putting off. (who here doesn't? )