Info on "What Card Is This?"

["Bill Garber" <willy46pa@garberstreet.com>]

Ok, I received this from Joachim Lange of ///SHH Systeme

   Creator of the Microdrive and Microdrive Turbo.

===============================================================
Hello Bill,

this is a hard disk controller for the ST506 interface.

It is called "Megaboard" and has been created in the years
around 1984. The company which made this controller was
"Frank & Britting" wich was located anywhere in the
southern part of Germany, between Karlsruhe and Frankfurt.

The Megaboard controller was able to control 20, 40 and
60 MB hard drives (perhaps 80 MB too) an has been one of
the leading players in the market these days. It also
worked in the Apple IIGS when this computer came up later.

Best thing has been that it supported CP/M, Pascal, DOS
and ProDOS.

The controller suffered (from my point of view) from a
few retrictions:
- it had a fixed addressing scheme so it could only be
 used in a single slot (usually slot 7)
- it could only support a few hard drives which had
 a certain geometry (regarding cylinders and heads)
- it formatted the hard disk in 256-byte sectors
 (for easier usage with DOS) and therefore had
 hard to work with 512 block handling �nder ProDOS.

The photo shown is the second version of the Megaboard
controller. It has been redesigned for an unknown reason.
The first version has been smaller and "more valuable"
regarding manufacturing quality.

greets

Joachim