Ancient 8086/80286 unixes?

[Jules Richardson]

Roy J. Tellason wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 September 2007 14:10, Chris M wrote:
>>  Here's a neato question: You mentioned coprocessor
>> boards, and in fact some kinda sorta functioned that
>> way (in some sense - stuff got offloaded to the mpu on
>> the board I guess). But what were some early ancillary
>> processor boards for the pc/at/?. That is, where you
>> plugged a whole 'nother puter into your main puter,
>> and got to run separate apps off of that? Hmmmmm
> 
> I'm remembering a couple of those in Byte,  which I stopped reading sometime 
> in the eighties.  A 32032?  (I never could keep the numbers of that family 
> straight).  A Z8000 for sure.  Maybe a 68K of some sort. It's all very 
> fuzzy...

I've got a couple of ISA boards here with ARM1 processors on; one has Acorn 
Podule bus hardware fitted so that in theory it can interact with 
Acorn-specific expansion cards.

I'm jumping in here mid-thread though so have lost some of the context - I 
can't think of a scenario where you plugged an entire machine (implying things 
like keyboard and video interfaces too) into an AT, but there were certainly 
all sorts of cards of the "CPU/memory/ROM/ISA interface" around onto which 
code could be offloaded.

I suppose the question is: "when is a coprocessor card not a computer"? :-)

cheers

Jules

-- 
"What progress. It's almost as good as taping it... on tapes which self 
destruct in seven days."

   - Bill Bailey on the BBC's "watch again" service