Might not be
hard to build a clone?
I would think it would be easy to build a clone. One could use
a microcontroller, of course (Re: recent discussions), but I
don't think it would be tough to use an IM6402 UART and
a 4060-based baud rate generator, and add a bit of logic to
fiddle the handshake lines when a new byte comes in.
I would guess the origianl was a dumb UART and a bit of logic.
Doing it in TTL would be fun, albeit harder. When you try to implement
soemthing like this with simple logic chips you quickly come to realsie
that parallel-to-serial is a lot easier than serial-to-parallel :-)
-tony