On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 10:52:50AM -0500, allisonp(a)world.std.com wrote: Geez I'd forgotten about the VIP, that was the blue plastic thing right? I think I saw it at a show in the early 80s alongside those nasty membrane ASCII keyboards that RCA used to sell. Anyway I've always wondered -- what is the ELF and who made it? I have a Quest Super Elf which I bought in kit form in 1981 (for $106.95, had to work half the summer to pay for it), I gather it was supposed to be a follow-on to the original Elf but I don't know anything about it. The I/O expansion was quite something -- there were a bunch of options on the main board, Quest sold little kits to stuff those parts (IIRC the option to drive a 20 mA TTY from the Q line was $1.95, they also had space for the 1861 video chip and even the 9368s for the address display on the control panel were optional), then there was one 44-pin edge connector, also a ribbon cable that went to the Super Expansion board (which I think I bought the next summer, $99.95 kit) which had 4 KB of SRAM and two (count 'em!) mostly-S100 slots. They had a 64 KB DRAM board for that (I think it was the only known S100 card that actually liked the 1802 timing) which I bought as a bare board, and tore my hair out endlessly getting that to work because I stuffed it with cheap surplus chips from Solid State Sales (which is what they used to call the basement of Eli Heffron's), some of which turned out to be bad. I started out with the $24.95 Quest particle-board/plexiglas case but it couldn't hold the S100 boards or the power supply, so I made my own case out of redwood on my dad's radial arm saw. I was really kinda proud of that, there are grooves for the edges of all the boards and the open frame PSU is nicely contained. So anyway I guess the ELF was an earlier 1802 board? And presumably not from Quest, right? John Wilson D Bit

At 01:39 PM 2/10/00 -0500, John Wilson wrote: ... [nice description of the Super Elf deleted] ... The original "Elf" was a design that was done in a two part article in Popular Electronics (IIRC) that was titled "Build this Elf Microcomputer for $99". Needless to say the idea that I could build one of these new fangled Microcomputers for $99 was a real thrill. So I bought the pre-etched circuit board that they offered in the back with the "basic chip set" and built it. With only 256 bytes of RAM it was sorely limited in what it could do, but not long after that article Quest started advertising "The Super Elf" which I scrounged up the cash for and bought as well. (since sold to another list member :-)) I even got the Super Elf enclosure and didn't extend it past the original expansion board. Then Neutronics(sp?) came out with their Elf kit and it had three or four S-100 type slots on the main board. My room mate got one of those (always had to have a computer _slightly_ nicer than mine :-) The really innovative thing about the Elf was that it was a CMOS part (in a land dominated by NMOS and PMOS chips) and the timing on the externally driven DMA cycle was such that you could build a front panel for it that would use the chip's DMA capability to DMA data into memory. This made the front panel trivial to build (and hence the $99 price tag). The worst thing about the Super Elf was that it used three of four diodes in series with the transformer in an attempt to drop the voltage enough that the 7805 wouldn't overheat trying to drop 12V and drive 500mA. --Chuck

On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 11:34:08AM -0800, Chuck McManis wrote: IIRC you're supposed to jumper some variable number of the diodes, depending on how much load there is (I think depending on whether you had installed the extra 9368s/FND503s (?) for the address display option). REALLY cheesy! And the 1802 ran at nowhere near its full speed, because evidently that's not possible with only a 5V supply. John Wilson D Bit