Floppies

Floppies

Back in the early 1980's, at one my first computer jobs, I took on the task of configuring the Intel's iRMX86 Operating System for a custom Multibus computer system.

Intel Blue Box

We were using Intel Blue Boxes which we were renting from Intel for the princely sum of a thousand dollars a month. These machines had (3) eight inch floppy drives. Generating a version of the operating system entailed firing up a program and then loading a series of floppies and letting the program run. This took hours and inevitably there would be something wrong and the newly generated OS would not work, so I would change something and go through the process again.

Figure 2-7. Multibus Data Line Use

This went of for days. Finally we got an Intel consultant (Bruce Warmbrod) to pay us a visit. When we sat down to debug the problem, we discovered that one the of boards in the system, probably our own custom memory board, was not following Intel's Multibus byte-swapping protocol. That was both a Eureka moment and a Mount Vesuvius moment. What spawn of the devil had designed this memory board? Turned out we had stolen the design from the cheapest memory board we could find. Learned a lot about the computer business that day.