nymetropolitans
Experienced Member
While digging through old floppies, I found a disk that reminded me of a long forgotten hardware part I had saved up my pennies to purchase when I was a wee lad. I forget which company made it, but it was one of those piggyback 286-to-486 boards that plugged into an AT CPU socket, this one being on an old Tandy I had. I think I purchased it from DCS Industries and I actually don't remember it working at all....or it might have been that it worked but fried my hard drive. Not sure.....I had the actual circuit board/CPU up until a few years ago, tossed it when I moved. If only I had known I'd one day regress to my 13 year old mindset and want to build hybrid AT/486 PCs again 
Anyway, the point of all of this is that I found the setup diskette for it, which is curiously labeled "IBM PS/2 486SLC2 Processor Upgrade for Model 50/50z/60". It's on an IBM 3.5" floppy written in IBM's official blue font from that era with a (C) IBM on it and everything. I was wondering if IBM themselves actually manufactured these upgrades cards, or if they just wrote the code to enable the cache, switch between 25/50MHz or do whatever other setup functions this disk does? Seems like it would be a strange product for such a large corporation to build and sell, especially because it's dated 1993... a little bit after people had any hope of using a 286 to do "modern" computing!! I'm just about 100% positive the brand name on the box the processor came in was not IBM. Quick research says it was probably Evergreen, but I know there were a lot of companies dabbling in these things for a brief moment.
Even back when I was very young, I was intrigued by these strange CPU upgrades. I know they aren't really significantly faster, per se, since they're so limited by the rest of the AT motherboard...but being able to execute 32-bit code and enhanced memory management on something that came out in 1982 is very appealing in some strange way.
This time I'm gonna hang on to the disk, in case I ever come across another one or if anybody on here can make use of it! I know these setup programs are incredibly hard to come across since they were made in small numbers and were processor specific. I know we have some folks on here that are way into IBM stuff, you guys know anything of it?
Anyway, the point of all of this is that I found the setup diskette for it, which is curiously labeled "IBM PS/2 486SLC2 Processor Upgrade for Model 50/50z/60". It's on an IBM 3.5" floppy written in IBM's official blue font from that era with a (C) IBM on it and everything. I was wondering if IBM themselves actually manufactured these upgrades cards, or if they just wrote the code to enable the cache, switch between 25/50MHz or do whatever other setup functions this disk does? Seems like it would be a strange product for such a large corporation to build and sell, especially because it's dated 1993... a little bit after people had any hope of using a 286 to do "modern" computing!! I'm just about 100% positive the brand name on the box the processor came in was not IBM. Quick research says it was probably Evergreen, but I know there were a lot of companies dabbling in these things for a brief moment.
Even back when I was very young, I was intrigued by these strange CPU upgrades. I know they aren't really significantly faster, per se, since they're so limited by the rest of the AT motherboard...but being able to execute 32-bit code and enhanced memory management on something that came out in 1982 is very appealing in some strange way.
This time I'm gonna hang on to the disk, in case I ever come across another one or if anybody on here can make use of it! I know these setup programs are incredibly hard to come across since they were made in small numbers and were processor specific. I know we have some folks on here that are way into IBM stuff, you guys know anything of it?
