Product announcement found on comp.sys.mac.hardware
San Francisco, Calif., January 10, 1991 – Today at MacWorld Exposition Brainstorm Products demonstrated an innovative bus accelerator upgrade for compact Macintoshes which delivers Mac-II performance for only 249.
Unlike existing accelerators for the Macintosh, the Brainstorm Accelerator(TM) not only adds a specially designed high-speed 68000 processor clocked at 16MHz but also re-configures the Macintosh bus to run at 16MHz, allowing memory and input/output chips on the Mac’s motherboard to run at the same speed as the 68000. Existing accelerators do not increase
the operating speed of the bus beyond its original clock rate of 8MHz, and are thus forced to slow down to accomodate the slower memory and input/output chips on the motherboard.
The Brainstorm Accelerator triples the speed of graphics operations and increases SCSI hard drive transfer rates by as much as a factor of five. Computationally intensive processor tasks, such as re-calculating a complicated spreadsheet, are accelerated by a minimum factor of 250%.
At the core of the bus accelerator’s design is a proprietary high-density Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), which takes control of key timing signals on the Macintosh motherboard. “The bus ASIC and a 68000 at 16MHz allows a Plus or SE to run 28% faster than a Mac II; it also reduces our design to a two chip system, which is super-reliable and costs less than
a fourth of comparable 68020- or 68030-based systems,” said David Zampino, Brainstorm president.
The Brainstorm Accelerator for the Macintosh Plus is scheduled to ship in mid-February, while a version for the SE is to be available in May. A version for the Macintosh Classic is also planned, although the company has not set a precise release date. Under development are options to add a 68882 math coprocessor and to upgrade to a 68030 CPU, both of which will be simple plug-in upgrades.
Brainstorm Products has been developing hardware upgrades for the Macintosh since 1985. The company has been shipping its high-reliability Brainstorm Memory and SCSI upgrades since 1987.