It's probably the 'go' button :) -- adrian/witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UKs biggest home computer collection?

That's a damn good idea, this is my first saturday night back at my south home for 3 weeks after today's packed Classic Gaming Expo in London so I'm still wired! Pictures will be up once I get hold of a flash card reader. -- adrian/witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UKs biggest home computer collection?

Actually, it's most likely not a CNC controller. It's probably too early to be a "Computized Numerical Control" device. There's probably no computer at all in there. It's likely an NC (Numerical Control) controller. The difference is that NC controllers are "hard-coded" logic, purpousefully-designed for controlling a specific piece of Equipment. Once minicomputers got inexpensive enough (e.g., PDP 8/e and smaller PDP 11's), they were a natural to become the controllers. But, in the late '60's and early '70's, it was more practical to build dedicated hardware to do the work. Later, microprocessors took over for the minicomputers, and nowadays, the controls are generally just PC's with specialized interfaces in them to drive the steppers, control spindle motor, and read absolute or incremental position encoders. This Houdaille controller looks VERY similar to a Houdaille control that was connected up to a Burgmaster vertical mill at my Dad's machine shop in the mid-70's. He bought the machine used, and the control was dated from the early '70's. There was no computer involved..it was simply a dedicated function state machine which read codes off of the paper tape step-at-a-time, and directed the action of stepper motors connected to each axis of the machine to carry out the operations. The old hardwired control on the Burgmaster failed at one point, and it wasn't worth it to repair it, so it was replaced with a later model Houdaille control that utilized an Industrial 8/e as the brains for the control. This was the first "CNC" control in my Dad's shop. Input was still via paper tape, but the whole program was loaded into memory at once, and executed out of memory, rather than the step-by-step reading of the program on the earlier control. It was also possible to edit the program in memory to correct errors discovered once the program was run on the actual hardware. The Industrial 8/e had a ROM board in it that contained the control software. Software updates for the control were performed by installing new ROMs. The first NC machine in my Dad's shop was a Rambaudi vertical mill, with a very early Superior Electric Slo-Syn NC Control. The control was all transistor...no IC's. It was housed in a 6 ft. tall 19" rack, with many, many small circuit boards plugged into a wire-wrapped backplane. It wasn't a very smart controller...it couldn't do absolute positioning...everything was relative. My dad let me write a program to do a complex part that had a lot of drilled and tapped holes in a big plate of steel. I got to punch it up on the Flexowriter, and it ran perfect the first time. Rick Bensene The Old Calculator Web Museum http://oldcalculatormuseum.com Beavercreek, Oregon

On Sun, 14 Aug 2005, Rick Bensene wrote: Is anybody here familiar with the Amacom/Amada machines? They seem to still be in common usage. I don't know what processor they have, or what OS, but the disk format is closely based on CP/M (on a 3.5" DSDD). -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com