The Eagle 1600 series

The Eagle 1600 series of computers ran MS-DOS, but were not clones.  Eagle attempted to create a niche for itself in the brand-new "16-bit" market by building machines that were as easy to use as their CP/M models, but had an Intel CPU and more RAM.

These computers came with MS-DOS, the PC version of Spellbinder, a PC spreadsheet program, and documentation.  They would run many PC programs, but most PC programs were recent ports from CP/M, and there was little agreement about standards.  Games that expected exactly the same video hardware as an IBM PC, or that called PC hardware directly for the sake of speed, wouldn't run or ran very poorly.

The 1600 line were the first MS-DOS computers to have hard disks.  Eagle achieved this by using the same hard-disk subsystem (Xebec hard-disk controller board, Eagle SASI board, and hard disk) as in the CP/M models.  As proof of this, I bought a 1630 with a broken monitor at a San Jose swap meet and put its hard-disk parts into an Eagle III.  The MS-DOS partitioning of the hard disk kept it from working right with the Eagle BIOS.  But after I ran the HDFORMAT program on it, it worked perfectly.

David Banoff writes: "My second Eagle was an Eagle 1620 (two floppy disk drives).  The disk drives were quad density, like the drives on the Eagle III, but half height.  The CPU was an Intel 8086.  Even though the 8086 had a 16-bit architecture, the expansion slots were all 8-bit, to use the expansion cards made for the IBM PC.  [The 1620] actually supported only 512 KB of RAM, in two banks of 256 KB on the motherboard.  At the time it was introduced, IBM PCs supported only 256 KB of RAM.  Even the later PC XT held only 256 KB on the motherboard.  No doubt, Eagle thought that 512 KB would be plenty."

"Later, expansion cards were available which could boost an IBM PC XT to 640 KB (such as the AST Six-Pack and Six-Pack Plus), but due to the memory architecture on the Eagle 1600, these wouldn't work for the Eagle.  Unfortunately, the later Hercules graphics cards, which gave monochrome monitors substantial graphics capability, also didn't work on the Eagle 1600.  While it came fairly well 'loaded' when it was introduced, the lack of flexibility probably doomed it.  It did come with, or at least the one I had came with, a SASI card allowing attachment of a File 10 or File 40.  I was able to buy two return-from-lease File 10s, and I discovered that one was already configured for the Eagle II and the other for the Eagle 1600.  Having one of each machine, I used them that way."

"As I recall, my Eagle 1600 came with CP/M-86, MS-DOS 1.25, and MS-DOS 2.0.  The CP/M-86 could directly read the Eagle II/III floppies (I never tried this), and the MS-DOS 1.25 (but not the MS-DOS 2.0) came with a utility to transfer data from Eagle II/III format floppies.  It would read the data from, but not write to, the CP/M disks."

Copyright © 2006-2007 by Green Sky Press.  All rights reserved.  Backgrounds and images are copyright by their respective authors, who retain all rights.

This page has been validated against XHTML Strict and viewed under Konqueror, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer at a screen resolution of 1024 × 768.  If you find any bugs, please contact me at the e-mail address on the home page.