PC compatible motherboards

[Todd King]

  <<<
  I haven't worked on process control or related in a while, but there
  were always public domain OS's (and boot routines) available for
  the 8-bit genre.  I'll bet if you look you'll find the same thing
  exists for the 80x86 types.  The advantage is there's cheap hardware
  already available.  You don't normally want all that DOS crap hanging
  around your neck -- it's too unwieldy, it's for a different purpose.
  There's too much stuff you don't need.  If you can find a simple OS
  written to work on the PC hardware it'll make a great platform to
  build any data logger, controller, etc.
  Tom Cloud <cloud at peaches.ph.utexas>
  >>>
  
  Yes it could be a working platform, treat it like an EVB for a 
  microcontroller. Forget the PC OS issues, just toss the BIOS PROM and the OS. 
  The machine will vector to the known start address; have your own PROM code 
  there and you are off to the races, just like a 6811 eval board. No problem, 
  other than not having an onboard A/D. Easy enough to prototype one onto a card 
  slot protoboard or interface one to a parallel port. Already have several 
  timers onboard though. 'Course you'll be using assembly for all this.
        Remember that there are thousands (millions?) of factory cars running 
  around with ECM's based on 6811 (at slow clock speeds) caliber processing; It 
  would be fun to use the latest DSP processors, or a Pentium, or quad 200 MHz 
  Pentium Pros, or ?? but you can sure get the job done with ALOT less 
  processing horsepower...
  
  <<<
  I really haven't had any problems with DOS.  Once the app is loaded and
  initialized, our DOS-based controllers really don't call any DOS or
  BIOS services at all.  The DOS compilers manage to translate all our
  core code to "straight" '386 assembly.
  >>>
  
  That's what is nice about DOS from a tweaker's perspective- it allows you to 
  get right down into the hardware level and has no "overseer" function.
  
  Todd  Todd_King at ccm.co.intel.com