27 Jan
2002
27 Jan
'02
11:44 p.m.
--- Mike <dogas(a)bellsouth.net> wrote:
From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502(a)yahoo.com>
That's the one! We had a family friend who put himself in serious hock
for one of those when it was new. I got to go over and play with it
The C3 was kinda cool... It was wild to see a box with multiple CPUs...
C3's are cool... One, a C3-SI with a C2D dual 8" floppy system using the
530 board (I think) which has the z80, 6800, and 6502 all on board. from time to time. He might have gotten it to drive
one of those T-shirt
printing rigs - remember those in the Malls in the late 1970s?
They
would take a bad picture of you and/or your family and put it on shirts,
cloth calendars, etc... He loaned the whole shebang to a "Junior
Achievement" post in the early-to-mid 1980s and they broke it. I lost
track of him and it after that. I should see if he is a) still alive and
b) if he has any parts of it in his basement.
I wish I could find the OSI 460Z board... that adds
the Intersil 6100
and some other microprocessor too to the base 3 of the C3.
That sounds wicked. I wonder how they handled the 12-bit bus of the
6100.
(If they had just jammed the CDP1802 in there too I
could have prossibly
settled on this one machine to collect...those bastards...)
Agreed... you could have all the big stars of the 1970s micros in one
cabinet. I still don't get how they managed all the different machines
in one box. The easy part is building a CPU board where you can disconnect
a particular CPU from the bus in software. The hard part is the handoff.
You'd almost need a way to preload RAM or select a ROM that was ready to
go for the next CPU you wanted to switch to. It's been so long since I've
used a C3 that I forget entirely how to boot it and switch it around. Are
there any manuals online?
-ethan
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