Micro 5 was founded
Micro Five trademark (TESS) actual trademark for computer corp.
Trademark first used 1981, canceled 1991
Micro 5 trademark (TESS) transferred and re-registered to another company
Digital Design Aug 81 Micro Five V-2000 terminal (pdf page 51)
1991 Samsung was importing systems as Micro Five. judgement filed 1997
History (as I can recall)
Micro Five was founded (probably around 81) with Cliff Myers president,
staff including Alan Gauthrup, Dick Brown, Mike Bryga and Phil Mahru.
Phil and some of the others would later constitute the core Phoenix Bios
Irvine, Ca staff, and their start was here.
They came out with an 8086 multi user system with home grown software.
When the AT was announced they decided to make a clone.
Though nothing to do with Micro Five other than guys knew it was around
an XT sized board which would take copied 286 bios was developed in
Santa Ana, and was owned by a Taiwan corporation.
They wanted a clean room BIOS with hopefully no grounds to have to
worry about being sued by IBM. They did develop their own bios and
a few other drivers, as they had the expanded memory. Their design
for that wasn't IBM compatible, so they did their own memory driver.
Their product didn't take off as they were overrun by a host of such
systems. But their systems turned out to be nice for system integrators
who needed more slots. Eventually they came out with I think a 12 or
more slot product.
They also I think had a 386 system as well. Eventually the server
product was the main product that was popular, and it was popular
with Novell server builders. Samsung was really pushing hard into
that market, but not having the success they desired.
Samsung acquired Micro 5 and their business and substituted in
Samsung hardware. I don't recall if they'd started manufacturing it
prior to acquisition.
They ended up breaking up the manufacturing for systems not used
for servers, Server systems and service and eventually suspended
the brand for all intents and services.
FWIW, they also did the same sort of acquisition and eventual
shutdown of AST research, a much bigger system. The overall
contraction that has left Dell, Lenovo, HP and a few other PC
makers had started, and AST didn't survive.
AST also never made any system liked as well as the original
Micro Five 286 and 386 servers. They of course were eventually
eclipsed, but in their time there was a pretty sizable business.
As to drivers for the original 286 system, and their extended
memory, at the time there was a driver designed for the Intel
memory for the 286. Interestingly DOS which was a very
dominant system at the time had a driver to access memory
up to 16mb.
What wasn't publicized was how Microsoft was running what
seemed to be a Real mode OS and accessing memory without
any extended hardware, paging, but seemed to be
accessing it in what was a new mode called protected mode.
That was significant because there was no documented way
to get a 286 back to real mode (1mb only) after you
placed the processor operating in the mode (Protected) to
access the extended memory.
There was no apparent hardware reset, which could
be used to force a return and continue to realmode.
What the Micro Five people had discovered was an undocumented
instruction that could reset the protected mode internal registers
without having to reset.
A system reset would have been very long, and would have made
operating the peripheral controllers and a host of other
functions pretty difficult.
But the instruction they independently discovered, and
used but refused to disclose was the Microsoft "LOADALL"
instruction, which Intel had not removed from the processor.
Originally designed to be a test feature, but not for release
it could load all the registers and the extended memory registers
that the 286 used for addressing the 16mb memory space.
A friend, Tom Roden also discovered and published
the functions of LOADALL, which outed the whole trick, and a lot
of other people quickly incorporated it into their drivers.
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