| Tecmar 286 RAM disk card |
This is undoubtedly the showpiece of this museum. A memory card that could accept from 256Kb to 4Mb of RAM and dealt with it as if it were a hard disk. Okay, so it's a full-length card. Well, when I was given this piece it was in the good old days when 20Mb hard disks with 80ms access times were legion, if not top-notch material. Having 2Mb of disk with nanosecond access times sure blew the pants off me !
Why, I could play with Ultima Underworld and have practically no holdups when changeing areas. Galactix was a breeze between screens. Basically, I could take any game of those days and copy it there, then run it with unparalleled speed. With the price of SDRAM these days, one kinda wonders why they don't reinvent something like this. Imagine, a card that can hold 16 slots of 512Mb PC133 SDRAM cards. 8Gb on-line with nanosecond access times ! When ??