SOL-20 on e-bay

From: Jim Battle <frustum_at_pacbell.net>
Date: Tue Sep 23 14:47:30 2003

Paul Pennington wrote:

> Jon Titus wrote:
>
>
>>Folks, I just put a nice SOL-20 computer on e-bay as item #2754896139.
>
>
> I saw that -- wish I could afford it. Just out of curiosity, what is
> the "personality module" that's included? Does it have something to do with
> running CP/M? Also, how much memory is on the main board?
>
> Paul Pennington
> Augusta, Georgia
>

Paul --

The personality module is a small plug in module with 1K or 2K of
ROM/EPROM located between 0xC000 and 0xC7FF. On reset, the code would
be executed there. The idea was that they you could plug in different
ROMs for different situations -- say an assembler, and editor, a
debugger, etc. In reality, it looks like they only made two monitors
and one small variant -- called CONSOL (1K monitor), SOLOS (2K monitor),
and BOOTLOAD (SOLOS minus the TERM command plus the BOOT command).
Their literature talked about an editor module, but I've never seen one.

The poor choice of the location for the personality module and the
display RAM actually hampered CP/M since it put a hole in the middle of
the 64K address space.

Many applications used the personality module as a collection of
routines that they could draw upon to make the application code smaller.
Received on Tue Sep 23 2003 - 14:47:30 BST