The Vintage Computer Library grows...

I added another 50+ volumes to the Vintage Computer Library today. A very ecclectic bunch of books, manuals, leaflets (no I didn't count the leaflets). I love collecting the books because in the dry times where I don't find much hardware they still can give that "what a find!" thrill, especially when you find a book from the 60's (or sometimes even the 50's!) on data processing or computer science with lots of nice pictures of old data processing gear. However, today's quick trip to the thrift store produced a very cool piece of hardware. I found a California Access "Bodega Bay". It's an Amiga 500 expansion chassis! First of all, Bodega Bay is a cute play on words, since that is also the name of a northern California coastal town, perhaps where this particular piece of hardware was manufactured. I remember last year picking up a California Access 3.5" floppy drive with a DB-25 connector, and now I know what it went to! The chassis is a desktop PC sized case. Inside there is a passive backplane with several slots. There are two cards occupying two of the slots. One is a memory board and the other is a hard disk controller. The chassis also houses an ST-225 hard drive. The 3.5" floppy was removed interesting about the backplane is that it also seems to have 4 PC-style 16-bit slots. I only had an 8-bit card handy to try out but it fit perfectly in the "8-bit" portion of the slot. I am almost sure this unit could allow one to use IBM compatible hardware. Am I wrong about this? The passive backplane extends into a protrusion coming out the front of the chassis and plugs into the side expansion slot of the A500, which connects neatly to the chassis to form one unified computer system. Does anyone have any solid technical information on this? Unfortunately in all the books and manuals I brought home not one was for this thing. Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass Coming Soon...Vintage Computer Festival 2.0 See http://www.siconic.com/vcf for details!