8 Oct
2005
8 Oct
'05
7:30 p.m.
Two comments:
I remember seeing the useless book on how to get the most from
your Sanyo Icon book at Micro Center here in Santa Ana, Ca tore.
The thing stayed there till a purge, around 1998 or so.
About 2 months ago, another one showed up at full price.
This is the same store that marked all their copies of K&R
C manuals down because of the copyright date to $5 each.
I of course bought all of them.
As to the CDP units, Columbia had a keyboard "ICE" or
debugger. You could rig it to go immediatly into a software
debugger on one of the serial ports before booting your OS.
Also you could set it so that control-alt-1 or something like
would drop into the debugger at any time, and I solved a lot
of mysterious hangs early on with it.
Sad that feature (letting the user figure out what the hell
his system is doing) is missing on Windows these days.
You only have your own lack of initiative if you use Linux
in figuring out what your system is doing, which is how
it should be.
Jim
BTW if we are voting I'd not toss the thing. It was pretty
in its plastic case, and it should boot msdos at least,
since the older ones were XT or PC compatable and should
not have had any setup disk requirements.
On 10/8/05, Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net> wrote:
On Sat, 08 Oct 2005 18:10:59
"Joe R." <rigdonj at cfl.rr.com> wrote:
Yuck! I had a 555 and it's the worst
"clone" ever made IMO! Feed
it to
the landfill!
Joe
Machines like that have historical value. I remember the Sanyo PC
Clones, too. They wouldn't boot from anything except the specific Sanyo
version of MS-DOS. They were 'closed' without expandability. Still,
they were early enough systems to have some historical value, as a
'kinda clone' system. The Columbia Data Systems was a 'kinda' too, and
I remember frowning on them back in the day at swapmeets and junkshops,
and I would LOVE to have one now (one of the very first IBM 'clones'
from before Compaq's success).
There's a lot of historical worth in machines from that era that were
'stinkers.' In particular, people who have bad memories of them and
want them destroyed will ensure that they are more rare than usual
eventually.
I have similar bad memories of the AT&T 6300. I remember all the time
wasted at work trying to get a high density floppy disk to work (not my
time, but the engineers who futzed with it grew to hate the machine.)
And yet, there are people here who would be happy to have an AT&T 6300
now. There are probably still people who consider them 'superior' to
the IBM-PC because they used an 8086 and a 16-bit wide data path.
Machines like the Sanyo belong in somebody's collection. (no room here,
sadly)
At 04:01 PM 10/8/05 -0500, you wrote:
Sanyo
MBC-555 computer in perfect condition with both color and amber
monitors, all the old documentation/packing and several years worth of
SoftSector, a Sanyo MBC 55x enthusiast magazine. Is there anyone in
the world interested in this hardware/material or is it time to add to
the world's landfills? Hope you can be of help (and can have first
dibs, if interested).
Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 23:57:02 -0400
From: Stuart Pomerantz <stuartpomerantz at gmail.com>
To: jfoust at threedee.com
Subject: questions about Sanyo MBC 55x collectors
Dear Mr. Foust,
I came across your website and your interest in old computers. I
have a
Sincerely,
Stuart Pomerantz