14 Sep
2005
14 Sep
'05
5:19 p.m.
If you could dismantle the PC far enough to pull the ROMs to attempt to
read them out in your programmer, then surely you could have added a
homebrew serial card or similar.
A real kludge would have been to use a couple of printer port cards
(which would give you 24 output lines) and a little external circuitry to
program an EPROM. These EPROMs were not hard to program 'by hand'.
-tony
the problem is not that obvious when pc's are everywhere.
I read the data onto a floppy on said PC. I did not own the programmer,
so transfering it via RS232 was not that useful. I could run a program and
jam it into a mini that I had (remember no nifty c or basic to process the
data on the PC to prep it for even Data I./O format)
The Data I/O's we had didn't have published or supported RS232 at
the time. This was a nasty and expensive option that was driven from mini's
or mainframes and most places had the programmer, with nothing hooked
to them. Everyone operated with a master "library" of parts stuck in
conductive foam, taped to a description of what was on the part, revisions,
p/n's when released and all that crap.
The fellows I worked with, who were the hardware enlightend made
their own programmer with an old disk controller (with 6802) providing
the intelligence and memory to support the programming. As the
system did not have the proper programming voltage, there was a
small HP lab supply fixed to the programming voltage.
It could have been used to move the data to 2732's I guess, but I didn't
have a way to get data into that system, as it again relied on reading
a source part, and programming a blank.
Jim