Ubiquity of the IBM Personal Computer encouraged software developers to create applications for the machine far bigger than anything conceived when IBM and Microsoft drew up the specs for what soon began to look like a very crippled little box – but while the enormous CAD/CAM and other applications will certainly run on the machine, the need to swap constantly between memory and disk makes them intolerably slow. Putting in a hard disk eases the problem, but hard disks are not particularly secure – or indeed fast, and reloading a big application from floppy can take an age. Micro Control Systems Ltd of Sandiacre, Nottingham has come up with another idea: store the applications securely in fast EPROM, and configure it to look to the machine like another disk. The company is offering a 3Mb expansion board for the Personal, XT and AT, made up of CMOS EPROMs, which dissipates a maximum of 2W. It comes with a card for programming the EPROMs, and once the latter card is removed, the applications are permanently and securely stored, so that for example, a software developer could use it as a more secure medium for distributing applications to customers. The programmer board is required to erase and reprogram the EPROMs. The EPROM board is UKP1,000 and the programmer board is UKP300.
