micom 2000 pictures, etc.

From: Lawrence Walker <lgwalker_at_mts.net>
Date: Wed Nov 13 02:09:00 2002

 Ok I just opened it up. Of course it's nothing like a S-100 board. I must have
been thinking of the Wang PC I abandoned. It has 6 50pin sockets on the
backplane. I have 4 cards,
 
 1 is labelled 64k Rom and there is an empty socket on the upper left-hand
side,which may be the one you noticed.
 
 An interface card for the Shugart FDD.
 
 I labelled "Printer and CPU"

 Another one which seems to be the video interface with an EPROM and
several other impressive-looking gold-labelled chips which appear at quick
sight, given my failing eyesight as L-P shotskys.
 
 Blast !! I unplugged most things and some of the connections only used one
side of the Aynsley connectors, so I'm going to have to figure out how they
were connected. The up side is that possibly some were RS232 type IOs.
There's obviously more connections than is warranted for what peripherals I
have.

> > I'll get it functioning again and likely, if the KB permits, simply making a
> > duplicate of the 2 OS disks would be the easiest way to get it to you.
>
> I would really appreciate that. There is nothing on any of the boards that
> looks like an EPROM and there is an empty socket on the RAM/ROM board, so this
> beast may not currently be able to boot. I may need a ROM dump from you.
>
  Should that occur I'll need a lot of coaching from you, since I neither have
nor am likely to find up here an EPROM burner or reader for that manner.
 I've now taken it out of the cold room. my 2nd story enclosed porch, and
moved it into the guest BR where I have an old adjustable height hospital
serving table that I use as a movable workbench. The undertop drawers are
good to put parts and screws in and I can adjust the height according to how
I am working. A nerd would find the present wall line-up impressive, with the
Micom and Shugart drive on one end and a DEC Pro with a VR 201 I was
working on in the middle, a Rainbow with VR 241 on the end, and the bed
filled with old Apple parts and Grid FDDs. Ahh, life in the (geek)fast-lane.

> I'll also scan the docs and eventually the other material I have, like the
> > Philips newsletters, communications and advertising.
>
> That would be great.
>
> > The cables shouldn't be a problem to replace in an urban center.
>
> I have the stuff to make ribbon cables. It just weirds me out that they put the
> connectors on the bottom of the cases.
>
 I noticed that :^) When I got mine I wasn't aware of the uniqueness of that
engineering decision and cursed it much like I cursed the positioning of the
AtariST mouse ports, but overall it was extremely well designed. I like the
little clips that hold the cards in place on the backplane, and the easy
access to the innards.

> > I might ask a favor of getting some ribbon cable in return later on.
>
> Can do.
>
> > It would be good to get a closer shot of the KB.
>
> It's up now.
>
> > Do you know how close the backplane is to the S-100 configuration ?
>
> Physically, not even close. But, judging from the way the modules are
> broken out and the fact that it uses an 8080 I would imagine that there
> are similar signals on the bus. I may try to sit and puzzle out what
> is on the bus tonight, but I've had a long day and probably won't get
> too far. You don't have schematics in any of your docs?
>
 No unfortunately. But each keypress and capabilities are well described, as
well as the outputs to the Qume printer. Later models used a TEK printer as
well. Because the printer was quite speedy(faster than the Spint I believe or
any other print quality daisy-wheel printer as opposed to dot matrix) but most
used a noise suppressor cover. I had timed it at one point and found it
finished a page in about half the time of a dot-matrix and with a much higher
print quality. I produced a brochure at one point from it when I was the
advertising sales manager for a community paper that was quite satisfactory.

 Should you have the time, I would appreciate it if you would open the KB and
describe to me what you see as the functioning of the keypresses and how it
differs from most common ones. I'm sure Mr. Duell could analyze it's
functioning and get me past any possible problems if my fault isn't the cable,
and the values that should be there as well as the testing.
 On mine the determinant keyblocks (2 of them IIRC) inside were red as
opposed to the ordinary black or white ones. I imagine these were multi-
plexers. I don't know how the signal matrix might have worked. Hopefully
my problem is just a cable one. IIRC I couldn't print, or access some of the
graphic(simple line or subscript) abilities.
 
 My son wrote a bunch of poems on it when he was a (very talented as all
our children are I'm sure) teen and I would like to retrieve them. My machine
had belonged to a lawyer and also had a generic will form(fill in the blanks)
and I had thought years ago of doing what has now become a big business.
Unfortunately the keyboard fault prevented me from printing altho I could still
view them.

Lawrence

> Bill


lgwalker_at_mts.net
bigwalk_ca_at_yahoo.com
Received on Wed Nov 13 2002 - 02:09:00 GMT