Looking for a PERQ

[william degnan]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 10:54 AM, tony duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> >
> > I rescued one for VCFederation museum two years ago.
> > http://vintagecomputer.net/perq/
> > I was just looking at it this weekend.  It needs a keyboard and mouse I
> > believe.  I remember there was a guy in Texas who had a few, never heard
> > the full story though.
>
> That's a PERQ 1 (or 1a, the difference is in the CPU board), The keyboard
> and pointing
> device for a PERQ2 series machine are very different.
>
> The PERQ1 uses a standard Summagraphics Bit Pad 1 as the 'mouse'. It has
> to be the
> GPIB version, and connects to the GPIB port on the PERQ. There was going
> to be a
> special mouse known as the 'Kriz tablet' but AFAIK it never existed.
>
> The keyboard is an 8 bit parallel interface with strobe. IIRC it's
> essentially the ASCII
> code on the bottom 7 bits and the top bit is the ctrl key. Also in the
> keyboard are the
> reset button (which IIRC just grounds a line on the connector) and the DDS
> (diagnostic
> display) which is a 3 digit decimal counter cleared by the reset button
> and incremented
> by a signal from the processor, The machine will run without a DDS, but
> it's a lot harder
> to figure out why it doesn't boot.
>
> Basically what I am saying is that while it is nice to have the right
> parts, there are going
> to be workarounds if you can't get them
>
> -tony
>

Tony - thanks I passed the info along to our club.

-- 
Bill