Now I have more space in my computer room my elder brother offered me
two systems he picked up some years ago.
I don't know much about either, but bitsavers has references to one,
which is a Texas Instruments 990 with twin 8 inch floppies and a
terminal. I have not tried powering it up yet and I dont have any boot
disks but it looks interesting. It has a 12 or 13 slot chassis with
most of the standard cards present except no printer card. Is this
rare, can I get boot disks, would anyone want to buy it, what can I do
with it?
Much the same questions for the second system but also, what is it. It
too has two 8 inch floppy drives, two volumes of manuals for Xenix but
no floppies. It is marked "Advanced Micro Computers Inc Microprocessor
Development System 29/05". There is a sticker saying Memec Systems
Ltd. The front panel is divided into two, one says "Support processor"
and the other "Microprogrammed system". Could this really be a proper
microprogrammable system or is it just system using a microprocessor.
Either way, which programming/microprogramming architecture is it? Any
relation to the AMD 2900 bit slice chips? For a couple of months I
wrote microcode back in about 1974 but not on this system.