13 Jan
2014
13 Jan
'14
7:25 p.m.
On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
On 13 January 2014 17:35, emanuel stiebler <emu at
e-bbes.com> wrote:
No doubt! I remember wanting to upgrade the RAM on my Amiga when the
US imposed dumping fees on Korean 41256 DRAMs and the price went from
$3.50 per chip to $17.50 per chip overnight. The main memory of the
Kiwi is 4MB which is 128 chips - That's $448 up to $2240 for mid-1980s
prices on the RAM alone (not including the cost of a PCB large enough
to hold 128 DIPs). FWIW, at that time, we were happy to have 1.0MB to
1.5MB. Nobody I knew could afford 4.0MB.
I'd seen that design before, but I gotta say that with all those bells
and whistles, you might as well go full 68000 on it. I think the
extra 8 data lines and a couple extra 8-bit bus drivers are worth
double the RAM and ROM bandwidth, but I say that having designed and
debugged 68008, 68000, and 68010 hardware designs.
I still have crates of COMBOARDs that I'd love to turn into something
useful, though most of them have a mere 32K of static RAM (a patch of
2114s the size of your palm) and 512 *bytes* of PROM (2x 6309, like
you see on an Apple II disk controller). Those aren't practically
repurposable, but the newer ones with DRAM and EPROM in useful
quantities could be. If only I had more of the Qbus boards, but we
sold out of those at the end of the run.
I did enjoy M68K hacking back in the day, and would love to get back to it.
-ethan
There is a guy in Germany, who just made a home
brew mc68008 SBC:
http://www.ist-schlau.de/
Ah ha! I was going to link to that in reply to Ethan's comment myself.
It looks like a very interesting design. I shudder to think what it
would have cost in the early-to-mid 1980s, though. The QL was a very badly compromised design, sadly. A
fascinating
machine, but almost every single design decision in it was wrong, in
hindsight.
IMHO, the QL done right - a 68000 home computer, built to a strict,
tight budget, using COTS parts and a largely COTS software stack - was
the Atari ST. The standard 8-bit sound chip, a standard PC floppy
controller, (I believe) PC-derived graphics chips etc. - and it was
still nearly twice the price of the QL at launch.
And Atari's sort of incremental launch strategy - the first public
prototypes with 256kB of RAM, the soft-loaded OS, the external
transformer and modulator and floppy, all gradually built in as the
machine grew into its final form... a good, sensible, if merely
pragmatic process. As opposed to Commodore's big-bang Amiga 1000 which
was too expensive for almost anyone at first, so that real mass market
sales had to wait on the cheaper, cut-down Amiga 500.
It's no irony that Tony Tebby eventually took the QL's OS onto the ST
as SMS2 and eventually SMSQ/E.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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