Acorn (Was Re: Reading PDP-8 paper tapes)

OK, refresh my memory here... what Acorn 6809 system would that be? I was only aware of two - one by Brian Jones which was a large hand- made breadboarded circuit he did as an experiment, and which ran FLEX, and one that I made which was a BBC second processor - *both* of which I have here at home. I don't remember Acorn making any production 6809 systems??? I have the original circuit diagram on tracing paper that Brian drew. My own was so simple (5 packages as I recall) that I didn't bother drawing a diagram :-) [I just worked from an ascii wiring list] I did two versions - the first was CPU TUBE ls139? (some single ttl chip for address decoding the tube) 2*32K 'greenwich instruments' battery-backed static rams I pre-loaded the static ram on a beeb with the boot code, so didn't need an eprom at all! the second was CPU TUBE Eprom 64K dynamic ram SIL (first SIL I ever saw!) Custom dynamic memory controller IC I was working on VLSI design tools at the time, and I designed the memory controller chip as my test piece. It was a PLA and a counter for ram refresh, not much else. [I found a 'work in progress' kernel source for my 6809 2nd proc earlier this year - written in Skimp, which was a compiler I had written myself as a University project; the compiler itself was written in the Edinburgh language Imp77 - Acorn actually had commissioned Imp77 compilers for both the 32016 and the ARM - and we recently found the full sources of the 3L ARM Imp (and Pascal) compilers at Edinburgh as part of our Edinburgh Computer History Project research!] It would have been a tremendously cheap second processor to build but Roger was quite set against the 6809 on the sole argument of clock speed. My argument was that it was a nicer processor and would have more high-level software than the 6502. Probably was true at the time although the 6502 did eventually get a whole slew of high level languages that I never would have thought possible. (I shared a house with the guy who worked on the Pascal compiler who I would occasionally give gratuitous advice to, and I also learned C while doing SQA of the C compiler) (quickly checks the web...) Well! http://www.stairwaytohell.com/atom/adverts/FLYER_Acorn_6809.png Never seen it in my life. It must have come and gone before I joined Acorn (I forget the year but it was post Beeb but pre-Electron) Other obscure Acorn kit that I have: the "Prophet" - a version of the Atom targetted at businesses. Never seen a single mention of it on the net. I have the Z80 second processor, various ARMs, I think a 286, a few 32016's - and a working ACW although it was having Beeb-side problems last time I tried it. Some day I'll photograph my acorn goodies and let you know what's available. Any cards I can put in a padded envelope and mail to anyone are fair game; the larger systems like the System 4 filestore and the ACW I'll be hanging on to. The atoms and electrons I could be persuaded to part with though they're easy to find anyway and I doubt you'd want mine. If anyone in the US has an Amercian Beeb (110V and NTSC) I'll be all over them to trade :-) - it would be a real boon for recovering the data from my boxes of 5.25" disks... Another project I did at Acorn was design a system for backing up hard discs to video tape. It used the teletext video chips (SA5050? - one of those SA chips anyway) to generate/decode a video signal. The actual board design was done by a new engineer who had been hired (Martin Gilbert) and was being broken in gently before being given any serious work. Hugo (file-system author) did the software. I believe the prototype actually worked but like most of my stuff at acorn it never made it to market :-/ Despite not contributing greatly to the financial success of Acorn, I have to say however that good times were had by all... it was definitely the best place I ever worked. G PS My main 'beeb' project before I transferred to VLSI CAD was the Teletext adapter. I found the source code recently if anyone wants it. I can't see Acorn giving me a hard time over releasing it after all these years...