10 Years Ago in BYTE

Five years after Morgan's editorial, many BYTE reviews were of so-called IBM PC clones. In addition to the Commodore 128, we evaluated ITT's XTRA XP, an AT-compatible, and Microshop Computer Products' IBM PC XT-compatible. The XTRA XP came with a 20-MB hard drive and 512 KB of RAM, a 6-MHz 286, and other hardware for $4595. That issue's Microbytes section reported on Commodore's Sidecar, a PC-compatibility add-on box for the Amiga that was displayed at Comdex. Micro Interfaces advertised its Run/CPM program that let a PC run the thousands of programs written for the CP/M-80 operating system.

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This Microbytes news item from July 1986 gives a quick overview of PC happenings that year:

COMDEX Briefly: Sidecar, OS-9, Imaginet

Commodore (West Chester, PA), which had one of the most crowded booths at COMDEX/ Spring in Atlanta, prominently displayed Sidecar, its IBM PC-compatibility add-on box for the Amiga. The new peripheral is about the size of a shoebox and attaches to the Amiga expansion bus. The unit reportedly contains an 8088 microprocessor running at the same speed as that of the IBM PC, a socket for an 8087, a single 5_-inch floppy disk drive, and three IBM expansion slots. The emulator also contains 256K bytes of memory, which is expandable to 512K. Commodore said Sidecar would be available in the fall for a price that would be "substantially under $1000."

Microtrends (Schaumburg, IL) introduced versions of OS-9, a multiuser, multitasking operating system, for the Atari ST, the Macintosh, and the Amiga. Specified by Philips and Sony as the operating system for their CDI (Compact Disk Interactive) standard for CD players, OS-9 can provide multiuser capa bilities, allowing several users to access one CD-ROM drive. The operating system, originally developed by Microware Systems for the Motorola 6809, is similar to UNIX but smaller and less complex.

BMB Compuscience Canada (Milton, Ontario) announced a network called Imaginet that connects IBM PCs with Atari 520STs The network costs $900 for the first IBM PC, which functions as the file server, $800 for each additional PC, and $500 for each ST. Transmission rate is 2 megabits per second. The company said Imaginet will be available this month.

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July 1986

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