On Sun, 25 Jan 1998, Sam Ismail wrote:
(regarding the Interact Model One)
> Scott, I've got one of these systems, and I've only seen two others: one
> owned by Doug Coward and another that (I THINK) Marvin Johnson bought at
> VCF 1.0. I got mine with some cassettes, but Marvin got a full set of
> cassettes for his, and in great condition. You may want to hook up with
> him to see if his tapes are working (marvin_at_rain.org).
Great! It's good to know that there are other sets of tapes out there,
since this machine requires a boot cassette to do anything. Most of my
cassettes load properly, at least after I replaced the pressure pads.
I'm still planning to try duplicating these using a cassette deck with
tweaked alignment for archival purposes. The Interact seems to use a
strange dual-stage load, in which a graphic image is loaded, displayed,
and (presumably) discarded before the program is loaded. This makes
"re-saving" loaded programs onto newer media somewhat more difficult.
> These are not very common machines. I think they were used as training
> computers for those "Become a Computer Technician" ads you see in computer
> magazines for those cheezy tech schools.
Interesting. I was somewhat surprised to find an Intel 8080 inside a
consumer-oriented machine that was produced after the market started the
shift to Zilog. I wonder if a correspondence course designed around the
8080 could have influenced the design of this computer, or, possibly, the
choice of the Interact for such courses.
--
Scott Ware NUMS-MPBC Macromolecular Crystallography Resource
303 East Chicago Avenue, Ward 8-264, Chicago, IL 60611 (312)503-0813
Finger ware_at_xtal.pharm.nwu.edu for PGP public key
Received on Sun Jan 25 1998 - 22:25:54 GMT