8 Aug
2005
8 Aug
'05
2:54 p.m.
I thought it
was Advent Imaging, but anyway...
Quite possible someone made a mistake in writing the disk labels of
course (they're copies, not originals)
Advent were a major user of PERQs in the UK at
one time. I got my T4 (!)
Nice! :) I gather the T4's pretty rare...
I think one of the PERQ boards I picked up yesterday's probably an OIO.
I've got one complete machine (but currently totally dismantled) with
landscape monitor, keyboard etc. from Dave W. (PNX on the 5.25" disk)
They're not hard to put together. The boards go into the cardcage with
the chips facing the RHS of the machine, and the boards are keyed so they
can't go in the wrong slots. From the left, the slots are : CPU Option
(nearly always empty, although a few hackers put a tape streamer card in
there), CPU, Memory, EIO, OIO.
The EIO board has 2 50 pin edge connectors on the front. The top one goes
to the floppy drive (normal SA800 connections). The bottom one goes to
the DIB (Disk Interface Board), and thence to the hard disk.
Ignore the front connectors on the CPU board unless you have a logic
analyser and want to trace the microcode. They're the microcode address
and data lines, bascially.
The OIO board will also have front connectors. The top 2 (50 pin) are the
PERQlink parallel interface. The bottom one is normally not used, but
I've hacked mine to be a QIC-02 streamer interface. You can generally
ignore those.
The landscape monitor is a Moniterm chassis. They are _very_ unreliable.
The CRTs lose emission, the EHT blocks (a partially-potted module, there
is no schematic in the official service manual) fail too. I must do a
workarounf for the latter sometime. The KME Portrait monitors (as on the
T1s) are a lot more reliable.
-tony