Terak 8510

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Sat May 11 22:14:23 2002

The first step is admitting that you have a problem. I have a problem.

I went to Foothill this morning, saw two Terak 8510s, left them there,
then the monkey in my backpack leaned forward and whispered "You'll
never be able to get one again..." and I walked back and bought one.
Later I heard that another collector had bought the other one.

Is this the beginning of a long slide into collecting PDP-11s and
VAXen? I hope not.

So, I wonder what I have, how it relates to the "8510/a", and how much
fun I can have with it. It's a box with two half-height 8" floppy
drives poking through the front. The ID plate on the back claims that
this is model "8510 B AH 484A", but the "B" looks like it was
rubber-stamped on and is bigger than the surrounding text. Serial
number is 1196.

There is no monitor, keyboard, or diskettes containing software.
There's a BNC connector labelled "composite video" so I guess that's
not entirely hopeless, and following links from John Foust's web site
to the ITDA site (and its archive of PDF'd Terak docs) I think I've
worked out that the keyboard connector is an 8-bit TTL-level input
port w/strobe, it wants to see scan codes, and I guess I could do
something to fake a keyboard with a PC, a parallel port, some software
and a cable.

Stan and his co-worker Gavin were amused when we met at their office
this afternoon. We had fun taking a screwdriver to it to look inside
and see what was there. We put it back together too, and didn't have
any parts left over.

There may be some serial ports on the back, on an I/O panel with four
3x3 connectors. This I/O panel has a cable going back to a card
(Terak p/n 92-0058-001 rev C) with two WD2123B ICs which would appear
to be UARTs. One of the connectors has a sort of loopback plug
installed.

The floppy drives are Shugart SA860-1s.

Other than that...well, we found the DEC processor card, the floppy
controller card (w/NEC 765), and the double-board that does the memory
and display. Looks like the latter board has 64KB of 4116s (NEC
uPD416s, actually) and eight 2114s which I suppose are the display
memory.

Didn't find much dust. Gavin remarked on how clean it was inside,
although I saw a couple small accumulations.

-Frank McConnell
Received on Sat May 11 2002 - 22:14:23 BST