Deckard <boutillon@free.fr> wrote:
"SYMBIOTIC FAST NOXY CARD"
Pics:
http://www.zellar.demon.co.uk/apple2/
Thanks again.
Ah - this one is the card we have:
<http://www.zellar.demon.co.uk/apple2/CIMG0473.jpg>
The card we have is missing the EPROM on the left side. It has an empty
socket there, so presumably the firmware to control it is on the main
board. It might even be the same firmware in the separate 2732 EPROM on
the main board, with the 2764 having the boot firmware and host
communication code.
The cables in the various photos appear to be using the unusual DIN-5,
but I'm not sure what purpose they serve with respect to the hard drive:
perhaps the card doubles as a network and hard drive interface?
One similar product I can think of is the Nestar networking system we
had in high school (I was there from 1981 to 1985). It had a parallel
network interface between the computers, with a dedicated Apple II+ file
server with a 20 MB hard disk (which was about two feet wide, one foot
high and four feet deep).
Around 1984 I reverse engineered the Nestar card firmware and patched it
to add support for ProDOS. The Apple II card only supported Pascal and
DOS 3.3, and there was probably some CP/M support (which I never
investigated).
The server also supported SOS, so presumably there was an Apple ///
version of the card. I doubt the Apple II card would have worked in an
Apple /// because it had I/O mapped into the $CFxx page.
The Nestar card was purely a network interface (and could boot the Apple
II).
The server was running a heavily patched version of Pascal, with a
special controller for the hard drive (from which it was able to boot).
There was also a dual 8 inch floppy drive, which was also gigantic.
The server hard drive was able to be partitioned into multiple logical
volumes, which were named (in a hierarchical volume file system, I
think) and tagged with the type of file system they contained (Pascal,
DOS 3.3, CP/M, SOS or various special types). Partitions could be
dynamially created and deleted, and they had a reasonably extensive user
authentication and permission system.
At its peak, our network included about 17 Apple IIe workstations on the
Nestar network.