PC532

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title: "PC532" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["microcomputers", "computer-related-introductions-in-1989"] topic_path: "general/microcomputers" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC532" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

The PC532 was a "home-brew" microcomputer design created by George Scolaro and Dave Rand in 1989-1990, based on the National Semiconductor NS32532 microprocessor (a member of the NS320xx series). Full hardware documentation for the design, including schematics and PAL programming data, was made freely available, and a short run (around 200) of motherboard PCBs were produced for hobbyists to populate and assemble into fully functional systems.

Hardware specifications

  • PC/AT form-factor motherboard
  • NS32532 CPU and NS32381 FPU (25 MHz)
  • 4 to 32 MB of RAM
  • National Semiconductor DP8490 SCSI host adapter
  • Adaptec AIC-6250 SCSI host adapter
  • Four SCN2861 DUARTs (providing 8 serial ports)
  • 27256 32 kB firmware EPROM

Operating systems

The following operating systems were ported to the PC532:

;MINIX: A port of MINIX 1.3 to the PC532 (sometimes referred to as MINIX-532) was released by Bruce Culbertson in 1990. ;Mach: Mach 3.0 was ported to the PC532 in 1992 by Johannes Helander, Tero Kivinen, and Tatu Ylönen; some work was also done by them on porting a Net/2 BSD-based Mach server (bnr2ss) to provide BSD UNIX emulation. ;NetBSD/pc532: A project to port 386BSD 0.1 to the PC532, initially called 532BSD, was started by Phil Nelson. This was integrated into the NetBSD project in 1993 and became NetBSD/pc532, with Nelson as the port maintainer. On January 9, 2008, NetBSD/pc532 was dropped from the NetBSD source tree, as GCC support for the NS32532 microprocessor had been dropped.

References

References

  1. [http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-pc532/2008/01/09/0000.html port-pc532: Death of NetBSD/pc532]

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