The Compupro 8/16 system was one of the last, big, expensive CP/M system
that appeared at the end of the S-100 Bus and 8-bit professional systems
era.
It was actually a typical S-100 box where the user could insert almost any
S-100 card build by the manufacturer or anybody else.
As Compupro manufactured a large range of S-100 card, the system could be
fitted with either 8-bit and/or 16-bit processor cards. One of the
best-selling card was a dual processor 8088 + 8085 that allowed running
both 8 bit CP/M and 16 bit MP/M software, at a speed of 2 or 5 Mhz, in a
multi-user, multi-tasking environment.
Several advanced CPU cards were available later: Z80 at 8 Mhz, Intel 80286
and National Semiconductor 16032.
Due to the large range of available CPU cards, practically all operating
systems and programming languages of the time could be used.
It appears that Compupro still exists and offers a limited support, spare parts
and manual hard copies.
William (Bill) Vaughn (Redmond, WA USA)
If you are interested in getting rid of your Compupro Components, I would be interested in having them.
I don''t know if this is allowed on this Forum, but I''ll post my email address for you to contact me.
gohim@att.net
Sunday 3rd September 2017
Michael Louie (United States)
The 8085/8088 Dual Processor Board was also available in a 6Mhz/10Mhz Version, which is many times slower/slower in throughput than the 6Mhz 80286 3-cycle Processor Board that Compupro produced. The fastest 16-bit processor offered by Compupro was the 2-cycle 12Mhz 80286. Compupro went as far as putting the 80386 Processor onto the S-100 bus before the Company folded. The most advanced Operating System offered by Compupro was Digital Research''s Concurrent DOS, which could be configured for multi-processor, multitasking, multiuser operation with MSDOS compatibility.
Sunday 3rd September 2017
Michael Louie (United States)
Minor correction. The dual processor card, "CompuPro 816", was a 6 Mhz 8085, 8 Mhz 8088 pair (only one processor active at a time).
Typically used with either CP/M-86 (16 -bit CP/M, 8085 not used) or CompuPro''s "CP/M 8/16", a modified version of CP/M-86 that would automatically create an 8 bit CP/M instance and transfer control to the 8085 whenever the user launched an 8 bit program, and return control to the 8088 when the program ended.
