MacCHARLIE

[snuci]

Hap,

You gotta hook it up. I did a YouTube search and there was nothing. A video would be awesome because some people think it never existed

 

[uniserver]

well hap or aplmak

they both have charlies

 

[jruschme]

The AST cards were part of Apple's bid for corporate acceptance, along with Tokenring networking and parity RAM. Phoenix Technologies as well as Apple had a hand in the card's design according to contemporary reports. Sadly I don't have much technical data on the cards. Can anyone tell me whether they used an 8088 or 8086 processor? How was RAM provided?

There were actually two cards- a Mac86 which was an SE expansion board and the Mac286 which was Nubus. I've never seen a Mac86 in the wild, but the Mac286 was basically a single (er, two) board computer which interfaced to the Mac and had its own memory. 1MB was the normal memory on a Mac286, though the later version could max at 4MB.

 

[Gorgonops]

some people think it never existed

That is a little odd, because I know that the unit received pretty widespread coverage in computer magazines at the time. Shouldn't be that difficult to find contemporary documentary evidence.

 

[mcdermd]

Sadly I don't have much technical data on the cards. Can anyone tell me whether they used an 8088 or 8086 processor? How was RAM provided

As I said, I have all the doc (and MSDOS disks) but not the card. I should get a hold of the guy I got them from to see if he might have the card kicking around.

According to the Mac86 user's manual, it requires a MacSE with System 6.0 and 1MB RAM (2MB for multifinder). It uses an 8086 processor and an external PC floppy drive is recommended. It shares the Mac OS clipboard and printers. No mention of on-board RAM.

 

[pcamen]

Old thread but I thought I'd post a pic of the insides of my MacCharlie.

https://vintageapple.org/pic/maccharlie.jpg