28 May
2001
28 May
'01
3:31 p.m.
> > > And what's about all that cool brit
stuff ?
> > > Come on, I want an Amstrad PDA, and a Sinclair MK 14,
> > > and of course all the other sinclairs, and the BBCs
> > > and yea, I'm still missing any NASCOM 1 or 2 ... ther
> > > is so much great GB computers to get ... isn't it ?
> > Aren't those the _common_ British computers? What about the Tiger, the
> > Torch machines (both the BBC add-ons and the stand-alone workstations),
> > the ACW, the Gemini, the DAP, and so on? Those are a little harder to
> > find, gneerally :-)
> Well, if these are the commons, you are realy welcome to
> find some for me - Maybe to start with an MK14 and both
> of the Nascoms (Now, a Nasccom would be realy great, since
> 23 years ago I was quite close to buy one :)...
I meant 'common' relatively... There are a lot
more MK14s out there than
DAPs, for example :-)
:)
I have never thought of the MK14 as particularly rare,
and I certainly
don't think it is particulalry desirable. I got one way back when it was
in production. It taught me a lot of things about how not to design
microcomputer systems (hint : a 74175 is a latch, a 74157 is a mux. Guess
what the MK14 uses to latch the data for the display....). I have the
remains of mine, which died expensively when the 7805 went s/c (Dear old
Sinclair didn't bother with things like heatsinks....) One day I must get
it working again.....
At least most parts are still easy to get ...
I personaly think of the MK14 as a nice example
for a minimalistic kit like a lot similar machines.
And unlike most other it had some aperance - at least
on the island.
Many of the machines I mentioned are very hard to find
in my experience (I
am still looking for an ACW, for example, and don't expect to find one
soon...). Things like the Oric (both 1 and Atmos) and the Jupiter Ace are
a lot more common, although still hard to find. Incidentally, there is a
3" disk drive for the Oric, which is presumably non-trivial to get...
Well, I have tapes for the Jupiter ... but no computer
to try them :(
The Gemini, BTW, is essentailly a super-grade Nascom.
It uses the same
bus, but with extra address lines (there's a little bit of TTL RAM on the
CPU card to implement a simple pager/MMU). In general they ran CP/M, and
some models have a SASI-interfaced hard disk, and even a (custom) network
interface.
Which is an easy way to do it - at some point around
1980 I did a similar thing for my KIM system - A 64
Byte RAM to fill in the first 16K of mem (except the 1 K)
wit a page out of 64K (well, I never installed more than
16 K into the memory extension :)...
Gruss
H.
--
VCF Europa 3.0 am 27./28. April 2002 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/