To All:
Just in case anyone was interested, here are the schematics that I found
for the Intercept Jr. and two of its accessory boards that were done
about 1975 or 1976. Your's truly drew all three of these on the drawing
board with pencil and straightedge. They were then turned into
publishable versions by a graphic artist. The two boards plus a third
one which had a number "devices" on it for lab demos made up the initial
Intercept Jr. product set. This was used to support the original
education classes that were based around this design.
Still looking for listings of the micro-interpreter. This was the
software that made use of the special keyboard and was embedded in the
mask-programmed IM6312 ROM.
You can see that the serial interface on the PIEART was arranged to
support either an RS-232C interface or the old-fashioned 20ma current
loop for communication with an ASR-33 Teletype.
On the RAM module, the board held a set of two AA batteries to provide
battery back-up on the RAM memory. It may be hard to believe but I do
seem to remember that Intersil actually patented the little circuit in
the upper right hand corner that prevented these batteries from being
back-biased when the regular power was on and kicked them in gracefully
when that power was lost.
Regards,
Jeff Little