Freon is now modeling a mainboard, circa 1984, for a vintage automotive analyzer he has just bagged with a Number 1 Phillips screwdriver and an adjustable wrench. It appears to be a large, dedicated brain board based on the formidable Motorola 6800 eight-bit processor (not the telephone, you fool), which operated at a mind-boggling 1000 herz. Note the lack of cooling fans, heat sinks and other eye-candy gimmickry.
This specimen is very intriguing; it has onboard inputs for a separate data acquisition board which - in the wild - fed it a steady diet of real-time information. The beastie used three pairs of MC6821interface adapters to rein in the task of distilling the electrical noise that emanated from the average automobile engine bay, and pumped it back through a 6845 raster scan controller in a manner quaintly reminiscent of the venerable Color Graphics Array of myth and legend.
The board's nimble 16 kb SDRAM happily buffer the ins and outs of this Motorola rocket, loading its bootstrap from a bank of six UV EPROMS and pushing the resulting data through a Mostek RAMDAC that weighs in at a healthy 128 kilobytes. Wow! I gotta sit down.
This is a serious real-time operator. Floppy disk? Nyet. Hard drive? Pfaugh. You want to save your info? Pump it through the Centronics port. There is something like an ethernet connector here, but with proprietary logic who wants to talk to it?
Next safari, we will be hunting the elusive HP Laserjet III. Keep your postscript cartridges in the holsters, folks.
Books by Me | Newsletter | Discussion Group
This specimen is very intriguing; it has onboard inputs for a separate data acquisition board which - in the wild - fed it a steady diet of real-time information. The beastie used three pairs of MC6821interface adapters to rein in the task of distilling the electrical noise that emanated from the average automobile engine bay, and pumped it back through a 6845 raster scan controller in a manner quaintly reminiscent of the venerable Color Graphics Array of myth and legend.
The board's nimble 16 kb SDRAM happily buffer the ins and outs of this Motorola rocket, loading its bootstrap from a bank of six UV EPROMS and pushing the resulting data through a Mostek RAMDAC that weighs in at a healthy 128 kilobytes. Wow! I gotta sit down.
This is a serious real-time operator. Floppy disk? Nyet. Hard drive? Pfaugh. You want to save your info? Pump it through the Centronics port. There is something like an ethernet connector here, but with proprietary logic who wants to talk to it?
Next safari, we will be hunting the elusive HP Laserjet III. Keep your postscript cartridges in the holsters, folks.
Books by Me | Newsletter | Discussion Group
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