27 May
2009
27 May
'09
7:03 p.m.
The Amstrad 2000-series machines (8086, 386, 386) were
quite good PCs
for the time, and for the late 1980s, quite futuristic. Side-mounted
keyboard port, like their ancestors the 1512 & 1640, all I/O
And that keyboard port, at least on some machines, was non-standard.
These machines had a bulit-in mouse port (DE9 connector) for a quatrature
mouse. The keyboard port was a 6 pin DIN socket. The reason was that
while the mouse 'position' signals went to one of the gate arrays on the
motherboard, the mouse buttons were linked to 2 of the pins on the
keyboard socket (the other 4 being the normal +5V, ground, clock, data).
The mouse buttons were heandled by the keyboard microcontroller and
appeared to the machine as keypresses.
-tony