13 Dec
2005
13 Dec
'05
6:37 p.m.
Rumor has it that woodelf may have mentioned these words:
Crappy hardware? I just pulled out my durned-near-20 year old CoCo3 (which
at the time was about 35 degrees F) plugged 'er in (yea, it was stupid, but
I was in a hurry) and it sparked right up. I posit that machines today are
the toys, and the machines of yore were the serious business tools.
Yup, and I drooled over the Gimix ads in Hot CoCo and Rainbow as well. Boy
howdy would I love to have one of those now.
Roger Merchberger wrote:
Same problem as the S100, tho - how do you chisel out an XT board edge
connector at home...
Firstly, I'd like to mention that I've always wanted to build my own
homebrew 6809 system... altho I've been thinking of designing my own buss
system (around 80 pins or so) so other CPUs could be used if desired. I
was thinking of a multi-board system with a 6-7 socket backplane. I want
it to be educational to others (read: see-thru Lucite case & lotsa
Blinkenlights! ;-) at the same time that I learn from it, too.
The XT connectors can
be got cheap. For a 8 bit CPU how many pins do you really need?
40 pins, but I didn't want to limit the design solely for the 6809. I might
want to build a 68K board in the future, and for that I'd need more pins.
Now a 4 MHZ 6809 ( that are not made ) would be just
about right.
But a 4Mhz Hitachi 6309 *was* made, and clock for clock it was even faster
than the 6809, had a hardware divide and some 32-bit operations. Schweet!
I think protype PCB's are still better as when you
add up the price for
WireWrap sockets
I think works out the same ballpark figure. I think the time doing a
PCB is longer but
less hassle since mistakes in wire wrapping are very hard to find.
Due to size restrictions, I wasn't going to wirewrap (except maybe one
prototype board, but even that would be temporary until I made a PCB) - not
enough board density for a "small" computer.
Them's
fightin' words. 64K w/OS-9 got me thru High school & my first year
of college, before I got my CoCo3 & 128K (later to 512K) but I still had
a maximum 64K code space - and that kept me working until the mid-90's.
Other than running (crawling) Autocad, my '386 was the 'toy' and my CoCo
was the workhorse. Once I got an EISA 486-66 server from my (then
current) employer, did I consider the CoCo my secondary machine.
The crappy hardware
on the COCO keeps it a toy. A few of those
microcontrollers have 128K of flash on 'em now.
I want my CoCo on a chip! ;-)
I want a Gimix! ( I think that is how it was spelled
) Just where are you that it is 30 below?
Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan on the border of Ontario, Canada.
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | A new truth in advertising slogan
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | for MicroSoft: "We're not the oxy...
zmerch at 30below.com | ...in oxymoron!"