Replying to a message of John Guillory to Bob Ackley:

 JG>   Re: The Computer Retrochallenge
 JG>   By: Bob Ackley to John Guillory on Sun Jul 11 2010 06:10 am

 >> Mine uses a 5.25" floppy.  It's hard wired to boot from the floppy and
 >> nothi else. Once CP/M is awake it switches to the C: drive - a big,
 >> heavy 5.25" hard dri that has a capacity of a whoppping five
 >> megabytes.

 JG>    I got to thinking of it, the one I had used a 5 1/4" as well, but
 JG> hard-sectored....  I didn't have a hard drive though.... A lot of
 JG> adapter cards though just to run the video, floppy drive, memory,
 JG> etc.

The NorthStar motherboard can't do anything by itself - the CPU is on an
adapter card, as are all of the various serial/parallel/scsi controllers for
peripheral devices - including the monitor.

FWIW, in the late 1980s/early 1990s IBM adopted that setup - CPU on an
adapter - with their PS/2 model 95 server.  There were 3 different ;processor
complexes' available for that machine, a 486 and two different Pentiums (I have
one of each , all have 'issues').

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