EPROM sideline

"Richard Erlacher" <edick(a)idcomm.com> wrote: You're thinking of the model 29 (and 29B). They've been out of support for quite some time, and they recently removed the last technical info (such as family and part codes) from their web site. I'd be *very* surprised if the pin drivers came anywhere close to being able to suport the 1702 or 5203, or some of the very early exotic PROMs. The Unisite was designed to support mainstream parts being produced in the mid 80s, none of which required voltages above 25V or below ground. A friend just picked up a Unisite for $200. I've been looking for a good deal on one for 13 years, but I don't ever seem to find them. The closest I got was about four years ago; AT&T capital was selling one for $800 and I might have been willing to buy, except that it had already sold the day before. Sigh. Data I/O recently (within the last few years) started putting some kind of 80 MB removable data storage device (disk? flash?) in their model 2900 and 3900 programmers. When will they get a clue and put a friggin Ethernet interface on them? Geting bits into the programmer has always been their weak point. Their async serial ports are too slow (even at 115.2 Kbps) for dealing with modern EPROMs and flash parts. On the models with floppy drives, you'd think that sticking in a floppy with the data would be fast, but no, they've managed to make that ridiculously slow as well. Maybe they think this will get customers to buy more programmers from them: "Hmmm... for this product I'll need to burn sets of eight 32-megabit flash parts for each version of the software. It will take three hours each for the download. I can spend three work days for each version, or buy eight 2900s and do it all in three hours." On the other hand, Hanlon's razor says "never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."