6 Sep
2007
6 Sep
'07
12:11 a.m.
Andrew Back wrote:
In terms of British minis there were at British Gas in
Leeds (England)
in the 80s a system made by Cossor Electronics (also made scopes and
valve radios etc) that was based around a TMS9900, finished in a very
fetching orange with flicky-switches operator panel. It had Pertec disk
drives each with a separate 19" 2U 'formatter' unit (controller?),
remote graphics heads that had some kind of controller (kb in, and RGB
out to big 20 inch or so CCTV-style monitors) hooked-up to the CPU by
extended serial links.
That's interesting; we were given a few 19" 3U instrument cases the other week
with video out (PC-style VGA), keyboard in (PC-AT type connector, but no
guarantee that's what they actually require), and a serial port on them. No
other I/O, and no idea what they were originally used for. Very
professionally-built circuitry inside.
I'll have to dig up some model details; I can't remember who they were made by
now. Seems a bit weird if someone went to that much trouble to re-implement a
dumb serial terminal, so it may be they do a similar job to what your gadgets did.
Never seen or heard of a Cossor computer since
Sounds like a pretty interesting crate. Sadly lots of manufacturers seemed to
sideline into computing in the 70s and 80s and have now all but forgotten
their computing past (if the company still exists at all) :-(
This has also just reminded me of another very cool
device we had at BG.
A thing called a 'Radac'
Very interesting... I'll have to keep an eye out for one; I've never heard of
anyone putting the data surfaces on the inside before.