77/68 computer (was Seeking good home...)

Andy, I guess the Electronics and Computing Monthly magazine and Stirling Microsystems must have based the design on the ACC one. The ECM design was on 8" square boards too, single sided tracks (you had to run loads of wire straps!). I still have all the documentation for it, paper-based at the moment. There was a choice between a 40x24 monochrome display board implemented entirely in 4000-series CMOS (which I built), or a newer colour board with 64K RAM and a Thomson EF9365 Graphic Display Processor. I didn't build that since the cost of 64k RAM in 1982 was prohibitive! That processor could draw at 1 million pixels per second - impressive for 1982. Some of the documentation is published by Newbear (Newbury Electronics), and some by Stirling. One day I'll get around to scanning all the docs in for general availibility. paul -----Original Message----- From: Andy Holt [mailto:andyh@andyh-rayleigh.freeserve.co.uk] Sent: 19 April 2003 20:40 To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Subject: RE: Seeking good home(s) for old hardware [UK] As I remember it, the 77/68 was published in the ACC newsletter (not in E&CM) - the original was a rather neat design by Mike Lord on 8" square PCBs. I built a seriously extended one of these (which eventually "fissioned" into two complete systems - connected by a homebrew network that was a sort of very cheap slow ethernet). Some boards were from the original design - others I designed and implemented myself ... most notably including a 6809 board (the original was a 6800) with the only technical data being a pin-out and some other vague descriptions in a Byte article. It was a couple of years of successful use before I discovered that I was feeding the clock in through the "wrong" pin! Amongst the peripherals that this system acquired was a large Calcomp plotter surplus from the University mainframe. Unfortunately most of the hardware and documents have now been recycled or worse. Andy