On 11/5/15 6:39 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
Incidentally, I have an IBM System/23 for which I have not yet procured any
software. In particular, I could use whatever utility software that's necessary
to format data disks. I haven't found any online sources of disk images for
this system yet.
http://www.nf6x.net/2014/08/ibm-system23-datamaster/
http://www.nf6x.net/2014/09/ibm-5322-system23-datamaster-internals/
Cool! I haven't seen those internals for a long time. System/23 was
the first product I worked on at IBM (wrote about 20% of the total ROM
code for it).
If anyone knows where one is for a "reasonable" amount, I'd be
interested mainly for nostalgia reasons. ;-)
Some interesting facts:
* The IBM 5120 (follow on to the 5110) used the same "skins" as the
System/23. That was because (for a number of reasons) System/23 was
late and IBM wanted something in the market and the 5110 was getting
a bit long in the tooth. So when IBM decided to repackage the 5110
they used the already existing skins for the System/23.
* The expansion bus in the IBM PC was the same bus as the System/23.
The connector was rotated 180* so that some of the less expensive
cards from the PC couldn't be used in the System/23. The other
reason for this was since the IBM PC was done on a "shoe string"
budget, they could take the System/23 cards and only had to do some
minimal re-layout of the board.
TTFN - Guy
