"Single instance" machines

From: Larry Anderson <foxnhare_at_goldrush.com>
Date: Tue Dec 15 21:39:47 1998

> From: "Hans Franke" <Hans.Franke_at_mch20.sbs.de>
> Subject: Re: "Single instance" machines
>
> > > And by the way, to catch up with the title - is there any
> > > other Commodore B500 around, or a Pascal Microengine ?
>
> > I hear of more of the P/B500 in europe then here, actually in the U.S. I think
> > there are maybe three or so around, since they never were oficially released
> > past the late prototype stage (due to one of Commodore's run-ins with the
> > FCC). Dunno how many (if any) they sold in europe.
>
> I never have seen any B500 beside mine, but I know the P500
> story - just the B500 is more like the B128/CBM 600.

So no joystick ports, or VIC-II chip? Hmm, from examinging the PCB, I wonder
if it is a universal design, cause there are a bunch of unused pads here and
there (looks like it could sport 128k, and there was another connector pad
(besides the co-processor one), maybe for more RAM?

If anyone has a B-128 handy; pop it open, the joyport sockets would be in the
far left-hand corner, (if you look from the 'front' of the board) I've been
curious about this. :/

0010111101101010011110000101001

> From: "Hans Franke" <Hans.Franke_at_mch20.sbs.de>
> Subject: Re: "Single instance" machines
>
> CBM 9000 aka MMF aka SuperPET - still kind of a dream for most
> commo collectors (like the 900). Other than the most desired
> rare Commodores, the 9000 was a production unit and supported.

Also alot of schools (secondary and more so, colleges) bought them.

0001010110101001001001110101001010

Here is a clip from an E-Mail I had received from one of the 900 designers!

> >> I worked for Commodore back in then.
> >
> >Must have been something, Commodore was doing pretty well in the home computer
> >wars then.
>
> It was fun :-) I live in Denmark and we managed to put a C64 under every
> other xmas-tree that one year (we assumed that every house had a tree)
>
> >> I notice you havn't got any of the CBM-900 computers ?
> >
> >I have never heard of them, I am assuming they are related to the 700 series?
> >The only thing I got so far in that line (B/P series) is the P-500, rare in
> >itself. Maybe one day I'll get more of those no rush though, I am a frugal
> >collector. :)
>
> The 900 was probably commodores biggest mistake, they canned it you see.
> It was a Z8001 based UNIX (Actually Mark Williams "Coherent") workstation
> with a BW graphical display (I think it did close to 1M pixels).
>
> Unfortunately they had to choose between the 900 and the amiga, if they
> had stuck to the 900 they would have owned the UNIX workstation market.
>
> The amiga wasn't bad either mind you.
>
> --
> Poul-Henning Kamp FreeBSD coreteam member
> /////////////// "Real hackers run -current on their laptop."
> "ttyv0" -- What UNIX calls a $20K state-of-the-art, 3D, hi-res color terminal

000101001010011010100100110

> From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch_at_30below.com>
> Subject: Re: Value
> Common classics are hard to come by around here -- the closest thing to
> kinda rare I have is (that I know of):
>
> Trackball for an Atari 5200 (serial #786)
> Commodore B-128 (local college garage sale)
> 2 Superbrains (local college garage sale; anybody have boot disks???)
> Tandy 600 (sent to me by a good friend in California 'cause it didn't work)
>
> I honestly don't know if these are actually rare... almost everything up
> here is rare (to me) and all of this wild, wicked stuff like OSI
> Challengers, Ohio Scientific, and who knows what...

I don't think they are all that rare, but the B-128 and the Superbrains are
probably a couple of the more interesting classic computers...
Received on Tue Dec 15 1998 - 21:39:47 GMT