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But it sorta was! I had a 3B1. You could run DOS inside a window in the main environment.
by bobmcnamara 3y ago
But it sorta was! I had a 3B1. You could run DOS inside a window in the main environment.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoLike, MS-DOS? How? It doesn't seem to have had an x86 CPU to run it on. (I'm assuming this predates emulation like we might use today for that kind of thing.) Edit: Oh, kept reading the wikipedia article and found the mention of an 8086 expansion card. That's cool:)
- nopakos 3y agoWe had PC emulators on the 68000 based Atari ST in the 80s. No extra hardware needed, but very slow! And I'm sure that emulators was a thing from the very first computers.
- pjmlp 3y agoAmigas as well, that is how some of my friends would do their assignments on high school.
- wkat4242 3y agoYeah and one of the reasons was that every byte had to be reversed due to the endianness. So it was never going to be anything but slow. There were pc addon boards for this reason for both Amiga and Atari but they were expensive as they were basically a whole pc on a board.
- rob74 3y agoI had one of these in my Amiga 500: https://www.edsa.uk/blog/the-kcs-power-pc-board https://www.edsa.uk/blog/the-kcs-power-pc-board (this was before the PowerPC CPUs appeared on the market, so the name wasn't as confusing as it sounds today). In addition to being a PC board, it also doubled as a memory expansion and RTC when you were using the host Amiga system.
- bobmcnamara 3y agoMine had an 8086 too!
- alxlaz 3y agoSome systems also had expansion cards with an x86 processor on them. A more recent example would be Sun's SunPC and SunPCI cards -- you plugged these in a SBus or PCI slot, and ran x86 code on a real x86 processor. IIRC that's actually what the AT&T Unix PC did, too, but I'm not sure (I never owned one).
- sanxiyn 3y agoSee "DOS-73 Technical Reference" on the linked page for details. Yes, DOS-73 expansion cards had 8086 CPUs.
- mschaef 3y agoSun also briefly made a 386 based workstation. It didn't do well, but it could run DOS via V86 in a window on an otherwise Sun desktop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun386i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun386i
- jasomill 3y agoThe ST was at least a cost-effective way to emulate a PC very slowly. Not so much for SoftPC for VMS, which cost as much as an entry-level ST for the software alone: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/catalog/Digital_US_Software_Price_List_19950403.pdf#page=161 http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/catalog/Digital_U... But hey, MS-DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1 would have at least both fit comfortably on a single TK50 cartridge or 9-track open-reel tape, so at least you weren't stuck in front of the console swapping floppies waiting for the products to install.
- philpem 3y agoAh, you had a DOS-73 expansion card?
- bobmcnamara 3y agoThat must've been it! My friend and I bought them used at a yard sale at the end of the airport from a couple who had worked at TWA - they were former TWQ machines. I don't think we ever opened them.
- philpem 3y agoNice setup! I have a 7300 and a 3B1 (7300 is single half-height hard drives, 3B1 is two HH or one full-height). One has a Combo Card (RAM and serial) and a Floppy Tape card, I can't remember what the other has, but cards have been pretty thin on the ground. A DOS-73 or network card would be extremely nice to have. The emulator actually started life because I couldn't find a machine for sale at a price I could afford, but the manuals were on Bitsavers. Someone later sold me the 7300 and 3B1.