Most used toys, was Re: The late, great TRS-80 - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

27 Jun 2007

...

Subject: Re: Most used toys, was Re: The late, great TRS-80
   From: Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com>
   Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 03:09:30 -0400
     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only" <cctech at
classiccmp.org>

On Jun 26, 2007, at 8:01 PM, Chris M wrote:
      The
SBC is currently sitting on the table behind
 the 8/m, mostly
 due to laziness on my part.  The disk images reside
 on the SBC's
 system disk, which is a 1GB CF MicroDrive plugged
 into the SBC via a
 daughterboard.  The SBC is headless; I access it
 over the network. 
  You ought to document this arrangement. 
   I would be happy to.  Perhaps I'll take some pictures of it tomorrow. 
If you do a simple block diagram and maybe descriptions of software on both
the host (pdp-8) and SBC would be helpful or better yet sources.

...
   I get the jist
of most of it, but yer SBC must have integral ethernet. 
   It does.

  When I see SBC I think Ampro or something LOL.

   It's very similar to an Ampro x86 SBC that I also have in my junk  
box.  (if I could only turn it into a LittleBoard..)  The SBC is a  
Teknor VIPer 830.

I suspect any SBC or PC that could run headless and has disk would work
given the right code and interface.  I've considered a small 8085 powered 
board with a IDE or CF drive to do that.

I have a BCC180 (z180 with 256k ram) and lots of parallel IO that would 
be a good candidate for that.

For PDP-8 ops, even 10mb is a "large"  disk I'm sure so even a 1mb ram
could work well as a "ramdisk".

Allison

...
   And what sort
of daughterboard (PC-104?). 
   Not PC/104...The Teknor board has a mezzanine slot (which I think  
is proprietary) which takes a small daughterboard that's not much  
bigger than a CF card.  You plug the CF card into the daughterboard,  
then snap that assembly onto the SBC.  It's quite a nice arrangement.

  I have
 a few PMMX SBC's that I believe have ISA slot
 capability (maybe even PCI), and even my Ampro Little
 Board/PC has a header w/ISA signals. 
   Yes, this one is similar.  It can take PC/104 and PC/104+ boards,  
and the SBC itself can plug into a passive 16-bit ISA backplane.  I  
always found it odd that a board that has PC/104+ (which is PCI on a  
different connector) capability would have an ISA card-edge connector  
on it instead of PCI.

  Some earlyish
 SBC's have "flash" storgage capability, RE Robot/Vesta
 OEM-188, but that's something different I take it
 (like eeprom?). 
   Is it DiskOnChip(tm)?  Many SBCs can take those, both early and  
modern.  I have a small pile of them somewhere.

          -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL