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Did the PI-6809 exist?

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 9:42 pm
by sorchard
Flying off at a tangent, while browsing around for the Wayne Smithson Soundhouse article, I happened to see the Compusense advert in the December '88 Dragon User and was reminded of an intriguing bit of hardware: the PI-6809 co-processor card for PCs. This ran Dragon OS9 & Flex and used the PC as a terminal and file storage. I wonder if anyone ever saw one of these bad boys in action?

Re: Did the PI-6809 exist?

Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2016 9:27 am
by sorchard
Found a bit more info. There's a news item in the Nov86 Dragon User, and a nice photo in the Compusense ad in the Dec86 issue.

These were aimed at serious developers:
1MB RAM
128K EPROM
RS232
£495 + VAT

Re: Did the PI-6809 exist?

Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2016 1:03 pm
by Bosco
I must confess I've never heard of this device before now.

Mind you, I'd not heard of the Dragon MSX until recently either. :oops:

Re: Did the PI-6809 exist?

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2016 12:36 pm
by vdc300
I inherited at original IBM PC (with an 8088 8-bit processor and it would boot into BASIC with a boot floppy, even had a cassette port) in the early 90's. As a Dragon Owner I was shocked to see an ISA card in one of the slots that had a 6809 processor on board, but never worked out what it did, best guess was some kind of comms card.
So the technology was out there.

Unfortunately PC and card are long gone, but I still have my Dragon!

Re: Did the PI-6809 exist?

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2016 2:12 pm
by sorchard
vdc300 wrote:I was shocked to see an ISA card in one of the slots that had a 6809 processor on board
Wow, I guess there were a few about then. Maybe one will turn up one day :)