28 May
2001
28 May
'01
4:40 p.m.
On Mon, 28 May 2001, Louis Schulman wrote:
No, you are wrong. This card is the interface to the
Vertex Vortex
Convection Oven. Special data base software accesses a particular
recipe, and then sends the cooking instructions to the Vertex Vortex.
Apple turnovers were a specialty of the oven, which was never
commercially successful. The oven had a robotic arm to accomplish the
flipping of the turnover, but the arm had a tendency to get stuck in a
programming loop, which would eventually flip the entire oven off the
counter.
Sorry, Sellam
Thank you.
That explains a lot.
I never saw the source code for the low-level (sector) routines, and the
docs that Vertex supplied me with were wrong about register usage and,
of course, which registers were or were not preserved.
Now it turns out that we were being asked to do disk format conversion
with an oven controller!
The docs had some doodles on them of slices of pie (labeled "sector"), but
the 300 RPM rotational speed of the turntable, and the lack of a head-load
solenoid could account for the production of cobbler out of what should
have been pies.
BTW, the later ones were simply called "Turnover" after Apple's trademark
people came down on Vertex over "Apple Turnover".
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com