My6502 Progress

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Thu Feb 10 13:34:08 2000

At 01:39 PM 2/10/00 -0500, John Wilson wrote:
>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)
... [nice description of the Super Elf deleted] ...
>So anyway I guess the ELF was an earlier 1802 board? And presumably not from
>Quest, right?

The original "Elf" was a design that was done in a two part article in
Popular Electronics (IIRC) that was titled "Build this Elf Microcomputer
for $99". Needless to say the idea that I could build one of these new
fangled Microcomputers for $99 was a real thrill. So I bought the
pre-etched circuit board that they offered in the back with the "basic chip
set" and built it.

With only 256 bytes of RAM it was sorely limited in what it could do, but
not long after that article Quest started advertising "The Super Elf" which
I scrounged up the cash for and bought as well. (since sold to another list
member :-)) I even got the Super Elf enclosure and didn't extend it past
the original expansion board. Then Neutronics(sp?) came out with their Elf
kit and it had three or four S-100 type slots on the main board. My room
mate got one of those (always had to have a computer _slightly_ nicer than
mine :-)

The really innovative thing about the Elf was that it was a CMOS part (in a
land dominated by NMOS and PMOS chips) and the timing on the externally
driven DMA cycle was such that you could build a front panel for it that
would use the chip's DMA capability to DMA data into memory. This made the
front panel trivial to build (and hence the $99 price tag).

The worst thing about the Super Elf was that it used three of four diodes
in series with the transformer in an attempt to drop the voltage enough
that the 7805 wouldn't overheat trying to drop 12V and drive 500mA.

--Chuck
Received on Thu Feb 10 2000 - 13:34:08 GMT