After much research I found that the company Laser Master founded in 1985 made “servers” or PC’s that were used as dedicated print servers- because older printers usually did not have the built in electronics to process image formatting and scaling and so on- for their Large format printers. These Large format printers also branded Laser Master initially were for banners and graphics for advertisements etc. The problem was that normal computers processed the print data much slower, remember this is in 1992/93 when systems were using windows 3.11 or early mac versions- as Laser Master also made mac systems equipped for their large format printers- and so as far as i have learned the older systems had slow and un optimized spoolers and color correction software.

It has been difficult to get all the specs these different systems as this was very early internet days and this information is mostly lost. Or not available on archival type sites.

However the system that i came across in Kansas City Missouri was a Laser Master Color Server Model CS1000A1. It was equipped with this Cache Computers motherboard and various other hardware. On the front it says Display Maker, which is another clue that helped me find some information.
Laser Master Corporation changed its name to ColorSpan in 1997, and in 2000 it was acquired by MacDermid who was then acquired by HP in 2007.

The V EISA has a very similar footprint to many other EISA VLB combo boards with a few exceptions.
Most of the other boards i have seen are equipped with 8 memory slots utilizing 30pin simms. This board has 4 72pin EDO slots, all populated with registered Dimms. For a total of 64MB!
And i have not seen another board that has 8 full bandwidth EISA slots, usually the VLB combo slots are normal 16bit ISA slots.
However the most significant difference is the chipset, I have seen Opti EISA, and SIS EISA, and have heard of an Intel EISA, and probably others. But I have never seen or heard of IMS, or Integrated Micro Solutions.
And when I say rare…. I mean maybe unique. After my months of research not only have i found barely anything about this chipset, I have not seen hardly anything else anywhere at all about this motherboard.
The only mention was another website that contained bios images where a person was requesting a copy of a bios for a V EISA or a Cache Computers Model 358.

So I guess the next thing I should cover is the company that actually made this board…. Cache Computers.

Cache Computers was a small boutique motherboard manufacturer, headquartered at 46600 Landing Parkway, Fremont CA.- Thats right! This was the address for another hugely famous company! SGI! - filling mostly special orders for the wild west of early white box makers. They actually had many early models, and one early success came from a collaboration with Velox using their CPU cooler on a BAT 486 50mhz mainboard.

However, most if not all of their other boards predate this one. I dont know exactly what happened or why- maybe someone else can help clarify- but shortly after this board was manufactured the company failed. And as far as i can tell, it was their last board. It may have something to do with the company Laser Master changing gears to stand alone large format printers and a specialized ink delivery system- no doubt how HP stumbled into the ink market… or that the chipset manufacturer IMS had so much competition from intel and other that they got out of the chipset market altogether and started making graphics IC’s. But at any rate the production run for this board must have been very limited.

Wrymaker wrote on 2025-01-12, 09:25:

This board has 4 72pin EDO slots, all populated with registered Dimms.

FYI, 72pin EDO slots are called SIMMs. the connection pad on the front & back are connected, in contrast to DIMMs where the connection pad on the front & back are actually a different signal

And so to the chipset. This board is populated with an IMS 9000 series chipset, the set consists of the 9057C, the 9058C, and the 9059C. All 9 series numbers are followed by the string 4aa12. Maybe a manufacture date. They were made in a Japanese IC fab. All the chips were manufactured 91/92. And unlike the other chipsets these are much larger packages, still qfp’s but unlike SIS and OPTI they require no support IC’s. The story I found about their manufacture is strange, it states that IMS jumped into the chipset market with essentially these chips, that they were designed in a record breaking four months, and then the company decided to ditch chipsets to make the Twin Turbo IC’s for their video cards?! Which cannot be entirely true as i have found evidence of at least three other chips or sets, and i quote. The IMS 5026/27/(28 an ISA bridge) Pentium PCI set- which would suggest a much later chipset… And a IMS 8848/49 chipset. The question is obviously of the chicken or egg variety.

The company based out of San Jose CA, did very well, at least until 1997 when they became iXMicro still pushing their graphics cards, and with a CEO Christopher Knight onboard- yes Peter Brady from the Brady Bunch- they landed some more contracts with Real 3D. Which culminated in the iX3D graphics cards the Ultimate Rez, and the Pro Rez, and for the Apple users of the world the Mac Rocket. Then in 2001 they literally vanished.

So the elephant in the room is, then why cant more info be found for their chipsets? I suspect it was because it was all paper based, and specifically with the 9000 series chip it was kind of rebranded the cache computers chipset.

weedeewee wrote on 2025-01-12, 10:09:

Wrymaker wrote on 2025-01-12, 09:25:

This board has 4 72pin EDO slots, all populated with registered Dimms.

FYI, 72pin EDO slots are called SIMMs. the connection pad on the front & back are connected, in contrast to DIMMs where the connection pad on the front & back are actually a different signal

Ahh, I stand corrected. Sorry about that.

The next step in my process will be to dump the scsi hdd that was in the Laser Master color server to see if i can determine anything else about the system. Its other hardware, and to have a copy of the configuration data for the eisa hardware that was attached to the system, assuming anything was stored in it and its even recoverable. Then i will try to post the system with the new Ramified RTC.

I still have not had the time to swap the RTC, between winter chores and work. However as far as ID and some other motherboard info goes. I have noticed that the retro pc website for hardware takes a large amount of its data directly from total hardware 99, which takes its data from microhouse hardware encyclopedia. Well I recently scored a boxed new copy of a stand alone microhouse encyclopedia for windows 95/98. And i will be installing it soon onto my win95 system. So that may reveal some data or jumper settings, as far as my research goes. This boxed software should be the latest and i think final version of that encyclopedia, so fingers crossed!