Marinchip -- History I have very little information on this company.
Apparently it was started by a Mike Riddle who had previously worked for
ComputerVision and its CADDS3 system. He wrote a program called "INTERACT"
in his spare time, starting in 1977. He was somewhat slowed down by the
state of hardware at the time -- he had to write the program in pieces, and
assemble it as larger memory boards became available. Ultimately, he decided
he needed a processor that could support hardware multiply. Marinchip
Systems, owned by John Walker and Dan Drake, made an S-100 main board with a
TI TMS-9900 processor that fit the bill. In 1981, Riddle, Walker, Drake, and
about a dozen other people co-founded Autodesk. Interact was rewritten in C
to run on the new IBM PC, and was rechristened the well know program
AutoCAD.
They produced three boards, a TMS 9900 CPU board, a 64K Dynamic RAM
board and a PROM/RAM/Serial-IO/RTC board. I do not have a picture of
the PROM/RAM board, but
here is it's manual.
Here and
here are two brochures for the company's CPU board.
