On Sun, 16 Aug 1998, Jack Peacock wrote:
Has anybody
heard of the Imsai Vdp 40 machine? What is it, and
how many have been made?
Not sure how many were made, but the VDPs came out in the late 70's,
around '78 or '79 as I remember. I bought several to use as special
purpose POS terminals in a casino. They were in a "standard" size
IMSAI/S-100 case, but they had a short motherboard (8 slot? have to
look) and bays for two full height 5.25" floppies. Typically they came
with an IMSAI 8085 CPU card, a two board floppy controller (not very
reliable), PerSci floppies, and a 64K DRAM memory board. The power
supply was scaled down from the big 500 watt version, plus it had an
extra regulator board for the floppy power. There was no front panel,
just two buttons, RESET and INT (I think this was connected to one of
the S-100 interrupt lines), and a power switch.
That's interesting. I've got two of these but always referred to them as
"turn-key" IMSAIs. I thought the VDP-40 was that all-in-one computer that
IMSAI came out with in the same timeframe that was so bug-ridden that most
were returned to IMSAI and hardly any are in existence anymore?
Is my information wrong?
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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