rogues galleries

Well, Some of the more interesting UK machines are : Jupiter Ace. OK, the build quality and hardware design are horrible (thin plastic case, rubber keyboard, bus multiplexers consisting of 3-state outputs against normal TTL with 1k resistors in series (!)). But it's one of the few (maybe only) home computers to have Forth rather than BASIC in ROM RML380Z. A CP/M box built in loads of PCBs interconnected by a ribbon cable that carries the system bus and power. How they got it to work I don't klnow. Common in schools before the BBC micro. Acoon BBC micro. You must know about this one... But what about : Acorn Cambridge Workstation. Take a BBC B+ mainboard (64K RAM). Put it in a monitor-style case with a Microvitec Cub colour monitor chassis, a floppy drive and a hard drive. Now add a 32016 second processor board with 4M RAM. It can run either an a 32016 box (runs PANOS) with the Beeb for I/O or as a normal-ish BBC micro (thrre's a swtich on the keyboard to enable/disable the 32016). Torch XXX. Torch started out making add-ons for the BBC micro, and it shows in that one of the expansion buses on this machine is a cut-down BBC 1MHz bus (hrre used for the internal modem card IRC). The other 2 buses being SCSI and VME. The XXX is a 68000 machine running unix with a graphical frontend. Somewhat strange, it claims to be user-friendly (it was around at the time of the first Macs), but if you're not careful you end up at a shell prompt. The power switch is a touch swtich on the front of the machine, when you touch it to power down the unit, it syncs the file system then turns off the mains. ICL PERQ AGW3300. This is a true ICL design, not a 3RCC one. It's a 68020 unix box with a graphics processor built from a pair of 29116s -tony