Whitechapel Computer Works MG-1

.> .. but then I drew a blank. It seems like these are really rare systems. I have one. I've even found it after the move (it's on a shelf behind me along with its keyboard. Not found the mouse yet, it's probably still in one of the 500 or so boxes still to unpack. It's a 32016-based unix box. There are a few gotchas that I remember. It needs a good set of NiCd cells on the power control board to start it up. If not, you have to do a 'jumpstart' involving connecting a 9V battery to a connector on that board. Some owners added an external socket wired there to make it easier to so this. The 32016, 32018 (FPU), MMU chips, etc are in nice turned-pin sockets. The EPROMs are in cheap sockets. Replacing the latter sockets will often get a dead machine going. The boot ROMs I have need 1.5M of RAM. There is 512K on the motherboard so it needs 2 RAM expansion cards. No real problem except that if it only has 512K it flashes the error code for 'multi bit RAM failure' on the LED, and nowhere in any of the manuals I have does it say it needs the extra RAM. Needless to say this led me a merry dance checking the arbitration logic, etc before I realised that what it was really moaning about was the fact that I had not plugged in the RAM expansion cards. There is a rare adapter which adds 3 ISA slots. 8 bit ones IIRC. There is a graphics processor -- a sort of blitter -- which is built in TTL and is bit serial. It wasn't fitted to later machines as it was realised that it was slower than doing the operations in software on the 32016. It looks a lot like an older PC, so it is quite easy to miss. -tony