do you know what a plus hard card is?

Question

Recently, I found an IBM PC in the cellar of my new house. I used to have one of these, and I'm interested in getting it running for nostagic purposes (Digger anyone?). When I opened up the case to clean everything, I was shocked to discover a "Plus Hardcard" (which I think is a proprietary Hard Disk), and a "Copy II PC Option Board", which seems to do something to the floppy drive. Any info on what these things are, how to use them, etc?

Answer

This question was answered on December 13, 2004. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

i described the Plus Hardcard as a miracle of miniaturization…a complete Winchester hard disk-based mass storage subsystem on a single expansion card… The clever package lets you do things no other hard disk can, like keep both floppy drives in your PC or double the mass storage capacity of an XT without an expansion chassis.

the Hardcard's installation strategy, which replaces the commonly used tag-along floppy disk full of often-arcane instructions with a ROM chip on the card. Everyday utilities are written on the hard disk itself.

the Copy II PC Option Board is a hardware boards that allows a normal PC

drive to be able to copy any disk from multiple platforms

Author

Posted by cristina of Katharine Gibbs School - New York on December 13, 2004