At 04:12 AM 2/5/00 EST, Paxton wrote:
>Joe;
>
>I would ignore the AVL. Does anyone know if Eagle made a S100 computer?
It appears that they did. See
"
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/vallino/personal/bio.html". That's a job
history of one of the guys that used to work for them. AVL decided to
adopt computers early on in order to be able to change slides faster. It
sounds like they didn't use the S-100 stuff very long before switching to
the IBM PC.
FWIW the case and all the cards in it appear to have been made by AVL.
All of them have their logo on them and the case only has the required cut
outs.
My
>bet is the computer is a generic S100 used to run multiple serial ports.
That's what I was hoping that it was but it appears to be a custom job.
For example, the ports on it are five pin DIN sockets. I've never seen them
used on another S-100 computer.
>However they could be custom controllers.
FWIW it does appear that they used the S-100 bus. It does have the right
connectors and the few pins that we traced out all seem to have the right
voltages and signals on them.
>
>AVL makes slide projector controllers for large slide shows. This sounds
like
>a very early controller. What are the outputs on the AV cards?
The "controller" output appears to be five 5 pin DIN sockets on the back.
Only two of the sockets are used in this machine. The others are there but
have never had wires soldered to them.
Could they
>conceivably drive Kodak Ektamatic or Carousel slide projectors?
Very possibly. But I don't know anything about the controls for slide
projectors so I can't say. I'm sure you'd need software to run them and
that could be quite a problem to find. There is one disk with the drive but
who knows what's on it.
Slide
>projectors use 2, 5 or 7 wire/pin connectors. Some AVLs will control up to
12
>slide projectors, usually in multiple of 3s (i.e., 3, 6, 9 or 12
projectors).
> Two of the wires control the power up and down on the light bulbs. If they
>did this directly there would have to be some serious power dissipation. AVL
>was an early adopter of computers.
>
>If I remember right Eagle made S100 computers before their crossover clones.
>
>This is my guess.
I think you're dead on.
Joe
>Paxton
>
Received on Sat Feb 05 2000 - 14:46:23 GMT