25 Jan
1998
25 Jan
'98
2:25 p.m.
On Sun, 25 Jan 1998, Sam Ismail wrote:
(regarding the Interact Model One)
Scott, I've got one of these systems, and I've
only seen two others: one
owned by Doug Coward and another that (I THINK) Marvin Johnson bought at
VCF 1.0. I got mine with some cassettes, but Marvin got a full set of
cassettes for his, and in great condition. You may want to hook up with
him to see if his tapes are working (marvin(a)rain.org).
Great! It's good to know that there are other sets of tapes out there,
since this machine requires a boot cassette to do anything. Most of my
cassettes load properly, at least after I replaced the pressure pads.
I'm still planning to try duplicating these using a cassette deck with
tweaked alignment for archival purposes. The Interact seems to use a
strange dual-stage load, in which a graphic image is loaded, displayed,
and (presumably) discarded before the program is loaded. This makes
"re-saving" loaded programs onto newer media somewhat more difficult.
These are not very common machines. I think they were
used as training
computers for those "Become a Computer Technician" ads you see in computer
magazines for those cheezy tech schools.
Interesting. I was somewhat surprised to find an Intel 8080 inside a
consumer-oriented machine that was produced after the market started the
shift to Zilog. I wonder if a correspondence course designed around the
8080 could have influenced the design of this computer, or, possibly, the
choice of the Interact for such courses.
--
Scott Ware NUMS-MPBC Macromolecular Crystallography Resource
303 East Chicago Avenue, Ward 8-264, Chicago, IL 60611 (312)503-0813
Finger ware(a)xtal.pharm.nwu.edu for PGP public key