27 Jun
2003
27 Jun
'03
11:50 a.m.
[Torch "Hard Disc"]
I've been away a week so trying to catch up on the list (hence replying to
points made in other posts here too!) ...
This unit sounds /very/ like a Torch 68000 Hard Disc machine I have, so
definitely production quality. Same ridiculous separate power supply..
Pictures: (apologies for the quality, they were taken a while back when
all I had was a webcam, and the machine is buried at the moment!)
http://www.irrelevant.com/pics/Torch004.jpg
http://www.irrelevant.com/pics/Torch005.jpg
http://www.irrelevant.com/pics/Torch006.jpg
http://www.irrelevant.com/pics/Torch007.jpg
http://www.irrelevant.com/pics/Torch008.jpg
http://www.irrelevant.com/pics/Torch009.jpg
Mine appears to be complete - it has the modem (connects somewhere to the
torch boards, rather than the RS423 on the BBC, so makes 100% of all BBC
native communications software useless). 68000 board is positioned where
the Z80 board is on yours, is just bigger.
The barrel jack plug connector on your modems was indeed the standard "plug
and socket" telephone connector in the GPO days (before they became British
Telecom) and was not a mass-market commodity - you had to pay quite a lot
to have sockets installed; most phones were hard-wired.
My machine /seems/ to run a 68000 version of CPN - there is supposed to be
a unix for it, but I never found a way to boot it into that, or software to
reload it.
I got rid of most of my other torch stuff; the communicator tried to sell
for quite a high price on eBay.. makes me cringe to think of so many going
to landfill. btw ... I got a pile of old Amstrad CPC bits, mostly GBP 1 -
5 up on www.eBid.co.uk (free auction site, getting a lot of eBay business
after their price rises!) at the moment...
This sounds a bit BBC-micro like!. There is a
Torch SCSI hard disk unit
for the beeb -- it's supposed to be rather rare. The one I've seen is a
plinth to fit under the nonitor contianing the SCSI interface (connectes
to the Beeb 1MHz bus) + hard disk and also a floppy drive (connects to the
normal Beeb disk controller). Maybe you have much the same unit built
into a case with the Beeb mainboard and monitor.
OK, been inside now - it is a BBC, with a Torch Z80 coprocessor. Torch SASI
interface hooked up to the BBC's 1MHz bus, with a Xebec interface hanging off
that which talks to the hard drive. Integral display is a Microvitec (probably
a Cub). The case appears to be production quality but is a very oddball design
(as is the seperate PSU). See seperate post for link to pics if you can
motivate yourself to look at some grahpics :-}
The keyboard's an ineresting custom design with about a million keys :-) Half
of these seem to be labelled with various wordprocessing functions. I since
believe I'm missing a modem from it, but one of the spares I have will fit -
not sure where it hooks up to the rest of the system though. 
