But for those who've never heard
of it, let me provide a few details.
thanks there to my sales agent... (ha ha, only kidding :)
The logic circuitry is on a lot of fairly small
plug-in cards in a
cardcage inside. CPU, memory, 3 or 4 for the display, ditto for the
floppy controller, and a couple of interface cards for the keyboard and
printer. Or something like that anyway. There are no custom chips in
there that I am aware of.
I pulled a few cards the other day when I took that photo of the insides - I
was a little out on my dates; earliest copyright date I can see is 1977 and the
last manufacturing date on any chip was sometime in 1979.
card list sounds about right without wheeling the machine out of storage again,
and no I didn't see any custom chips in my machine either. Think there are only
two boards for the display, joined both on the backplane and the outer edge.
Then CPU, memory, RTC, keyboard, drives x2, printer, and an unknown board (see
below)
The printer (at least on mine) is a Hitype II. With
that strange 50 pin
interface (separate control lines for selecting a character, deciding how
far to advance the carriage/paper, and so on).
curious. Mine's definitely a Diablo unit and plugs into its own card within the
cardcage in the system unit. But there's also a seperate card in there (oddly,
marked as Diablo!) with a large connector on the outer edge (2 rows of pins,
non-staggered) with nothing plugged into it. I have no idea what that's for -
that connector looks purposeful though. There's not a huge amount of logic
inside this thing so I suppose figuring out a circuit diagram wouldn't be too
difficult and maybe then its function would be revealed.
oh, and it's a 'proper' machine, in that it has wheels on the bottom ;-)
cheers
Jules
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