Recent purchase of NIC-80 computer.

[dwight]

Hi Paul
 It may be a little slow for DSP. Its main thing was that the acquisition didn't require and processor time. It was designed before uPs. ( not counting what was used in the F16's ).
It is fun because it has a full front panel to toggle in a bootstrap. Then one can load with the serial. Mine also has a floppy drive ( something is broken right now ). I also have a Diablo 30 for it but haven't had time to play with it. The floppy was working at one time. I had to rewrite the low level code for the floppy from code I had for the diablo.
Bob has no mass storage yet. It is on his list of projects.
Dwight


________________________________
From: Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net>
Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2022 10:15 AM
To: dwight <dkelvey at hotmail.com>; cctalk at classiccmp.org <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: Recent purchase of NIC-80 computer.



> On May 12, 2022, at 1:03 PM, dwight via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> Hi All
> There was a Nicolet computer purchased recently on ebay:
> https://www.ebay.com/bfl/viewbids/363826255294?item=363826255294&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2565
> Looking at the buyers history, it looks like it was purchased by a collector.
> Bob Rosenbloom and I are wondering if anyone know who might have purchased it and if they are expecting to restore it to operational status?
> These are an interesting computer being that it is a 20 bit word. It was also designed specifically to do FFT's with specialized instructions like bit reversing and hardware multiply and divide.

That may simply be a quite ordinary DSP processor.  Hardware multiply and in particular single cycle mul + add are typical DSP operations because you need them for FIR filters, one of the most common applications of a DSP.  And of course bit reverse for FFT, which has the nice property of being very easy in hardware.

        paul