25 Feb
1998
25 Feb
'98
12:37 p.m.
Cool front panel Tim!
Maybe replicas should follow the example set by Matchbox (Diecast model
cars). In their case all replicas were made at 80% of original size.
Except for Disk drives and connectors it might work. That way genuine
collectors would be assured of the uniqueness of the original and yet a
person that just wanted the function of the classic machine might be able
to get one at a less than insane cost.
Bad idea?
George Rachor
=========================================================
George L. Rachor george(a)racsys.rt.rain.com
Beaverton, Oregon http://racsys.rt.rain.com
On Wed, 25 Feb 1998, Tim Shoppa wrote:
On Tue, 24 Feb
1998, John Higginbotham wrote:
You've also got the issue of date codes on IC's to deal with. And not many
40-pin DIPs are still made the same way as original 8080A's, i.e.
white ceramic with a gold cap.
Thinking out loud:
I wonder what the market would be for an Apple I replica?
It would be very strong if you claimed it was an original :-) That's one
reason I won't pay a lot for a collectible computer. How are you going to
authenticate it? Most of the chips and processes are still available
today, so it's fairly straightforward to clone them. Prediction: 10 years from now, we'll be able
to go to Hong Kong and buy a
couterfeit Altair for $100!
Not a chance. While the actual electronics "silicon" inside an Altair is
worth less than $50 today, the sheet metal and the power supply transformer
would cost you a couple hundred dollars to duplicate. (While the total
cost would be about the same, the distribution of the costs is almost
exactly reveresed from 20 years ago.)
For those who really want a S-100 front panel machine, maybe they'd be
willing to pay for me to make duplicates of my TIMSAI. Features:
1. Front panel design modeled after the IMSAI. (Hey - the plexiglass/
photomask/white mask/colored plexiglass sandwich is the the *only*
sensible design I've ever seen!)
2. Blue (silicon carbide) LED's instead of red LED's on the front. (Heck,
as long as I was investing many long hours and many $ into doing the sheet
metal work, why not pay for something *new* on the front.)
3. Blue and red C&K paddle switches, like the original, but with two
extra mode switches to allow you to get at the 24-bit-wide
IEEE-696 address bus and the 16-bit wide data bus.
4. Takes all standard IEEE-696/S-100 cards, of course, but my preferred
configuration has a 20 MHz Z180 with 2 Megs of fast SRAM, a four-disk
floppy controller, and a SCSI interface all on a single board.
Automatic wait states are inserted for all "off-board" transfers,
of course.
Tim.