On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 10:54 AM, tony duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
I rescued one for VCFederation museum two years ago.
http://vintagecomputer.net/perq/
I was just looking at it this weekend. It needs a keyboard and mouse I
believe. I remember there was a guy in Texas who had a few, never heard
the full story though.
That's a PERQ 1 (or 1a, the difference is in the CPU board), The keyboard
and pointing
device for a PERQ2 series machine are very different.
The PERQ1 uses a standard Summagraphics Bit Pad 1 as the 'mouse'. It has
to be the
GPIB version, and connects to the GPIB port on the PERQ. There was going
to be a
special mouse known as the 'Kriz tablet' but AFAIK it never existed.
The keyboard is an 8 bit parallel interface with strobe. IIRC it's
essentially the ASCII
code on the bottom 7 bits and the top bit is the ctrl key. Also in the
keyboard are the
reset button (which IIRC just grounds a line on the connector) and the DDS
(diagnostic
display) which is a 3 digit decimal counter cleared by the reset button
and incremented
by a signal from the processor, The machine will run without a DDS, but
it's a lot harder
to figure out why it doesn't boot.
Basically what I am saying is that while it is nice to have the right
parts, there are going
to be workarounds if you can't get them
-tony