My6502 Progress

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Thu Feb 10 12:39:34 2000

On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 10:52:50AM -0500, allisonp_at_world.std.com wrote:
> If you do I'm doing a some day project for the 1802 as well... I want one
> that is more than the basic ELF design (approximating VIP only serial IO).

Geez I'd forgotten about the VIP, that was the blue plastic thing right?
I think I saw it at a show in the early 80s alongside those nasty membrane
ASCII keyboards that RCA used to sell.

Anyway I've always wondered -- what is the ELF and who made it? I have a
Quest Super Elf which I bought in kit form in 1981 (for $106.95, had to work
half the summer to pay for it), I gather it was supposed to be a follow-on
to the original Elf but I don't know anything about it. The I/O expansion
was quite something -- there were a bunch of options on the main board,
Quest sold little kits to stuff those parts (IIRC the option to drive a 20
mA TTY from the Q line was $1.95, they also had space for the 1861 video
chip and even the 9368s for the address display on the control panel were
optional), then there was one 44-pin edge connector, also a ribbon cable that
went to the Super Expansion board (which I think I bought the next summer,
$99.95 kit) which had 4 KB of SRAM and two (count 'em!) mostly-S100 slots.
They had a 64 KB DRAM board for that (I think it was the only known S100
card that actually liked the 1802 timing) which I bought as a bare board,
and tore my hair out endlessly getting that to work because I stuffed it
with cheap surplus chips from Solid State Sales (which is what they used to
call the basement of Eli Heffron's), some of which turned out to be bad.

I started out with the $24.95 Quest particle-board/plexiglas case but it
couldn't hold the S100 boards or the power supply, so I made my own case
out of redwood on my dad's radial arm saw. I was really kinda proud of that,
there are grooves for the edges of all the boards and the open frame PSU is
nicely contained.

So anyway I guess the ELF was an earlier 1802 board? And presumably not from
Quest, right?

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Thu Feb 10 2000 - 12:39:34 GMT