Difference between revisions of "Comart"

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Revision as of 19:42, 15 December 2017

Comart were a British manufacturer of single and multi-user microcomputers that ran operating systems from the Digital Research CP/M family.

S100

The Communicator was built on the popular S-100 bus. A later S-100 model featured an 80386 processor card, ran Concurrent DOS 386 and supported multiple users via serial terminals.

Workstation

The Comart Workstation was a single-user microcomputer built around the Intel 80186 microprocessor. 256K of RAM was soldered to the mainboard and 512K could be added via a 512K daughterboard. The Workstation could run MS-DOS and offered some degree of compatibility with the IBM PC. It could run Digital Research GEM graphical user interface and Comcart offered a Mouse Systems optical mouse similar to that used with SUN workstations. The Workstation could also run Concurrent CP/M-86 (or Concurrent DOS), which supported multitasking and Comart Net, a proprietary LAN technology. The case had two 5.25" drive bays. Models were available with one or two 720K double-sided quad-density floppy disk drives and a 10M MFM hard disk drive. A utility later became available that could format 20M or 40M hard disks for use in the Workstation.

Quad

The Comart Quad, developed from the Workstation, shared many common parts including the case, power supply and disk drives. It lacked the mouse port and on-board graphics and instead had four serial ports to plug terminals into. With Concurrent CP/M-86 four users could each be running four programs each.