PC532

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The PC532 was a "home-brew" microcomputer design created by George Scolaro and Dave Rand in 1989-90, based around the National Semiconductor NS32532 microprocessor (a member of the NS320xx series). Full hardware documentation for the design, including schematics and PAL programming data, was made freely available, and a short run (around 200) of motherboard PCBs were produced for hobbyists to populate and assemble into fully-functional systems.

[edit] Hardware specifications

  • PC/AT form-factor motherboard
  • NS32532 CPU and NS32381 FPU (25MHz)
  • 4 to 32 MB of RAM
  • NCR DP8490 SCSI host adapter
  • Adaptec AIC-6250 SCSI host adapter
  • Four SCN2861 DUARTs (providing 8 serial ports)
  • 27256 32 kB firmware EPROM

[edit] Operating systems

The following operating systems were ported to the PC532:

  • MINIX: a port of MINIX 1.3 to the PC532 (sometimes referred to as MINIX-532) was released by Bruce Culbertson in 1990.
  • Mach: Mach 3.0 was ported to the PC532 in 1992 by Johannes Helander, Tero Kivinen, and Tatu Ylonen, and some work was also done by them on porting a Net/2 BSD-based Mach server (bnr2ss) to provide BSD UNIX emulation.
  • NetBSD/pc532: A project to port 386BSD 0.1 to the PC532, initially called 532BSD, was started by Phil Nelson. This was integrated into the NetBSD project in 1993 and became NetBSD/pc532, with Nelson as the port maintainer.

[edit] External links