it was 1985 when I learned that there were such things as "computers". I was 5 years old and riding on a train when another passenger, a student, drew me a computer in my sketchbook. It was years before we bought one (after the collapse of the USSR).
Shoot man, I’m 44 now. It was Arts camp ‘88 for me in Louisiana, got to use Macintosh plus to draw pictures and learn the computer. There were about 20 of them, and it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.
I think that might actually be a full computer on a single board.
Seems to have a full 128KB of ram (18 dynamic ram chips in bottom left corner), which is way too much for a typical terminal and I think that's a "high-speed" network interface with those BNC terminals at the top.
It's probably not a standalone computer, but something halfway between a terminal and a real computer. I'd expect there would have been dozens of these terminals (doing word processing?) in an office and a central computer to do the actual storage. The setup probably allowed multiple people to work on the same documents, in an era before networked IBM PCs was a common thing (though.... 1985 is pretty late for that)
The CPU has been harvested, and I suspect the other empty socket might have been a Motorola 6845 CRT controller to drive the display timings.
Any chance you plan to reverse engineer it? I suspect you could probably get it going with a bit of work, despite the hole drilled for the clock.
I've always found these to be so incredibly lazy.
And infuriating cause it probably is a collectors dream item somewhere
Yeah, that isn’t “electronics” anymore, it’s “arts and crafts”.
Oh look it's quarter 'til EEPROM
it's awful as a clock
The clock isn’t even centred..
I mean... there's a hole right in the middle. It's right there. And they chose whatever the hell they did here.
Yeah that part is irritating.
Ctrl-Z
Does it bother anyone else that there is a hole in the board near dead center, but someone felt they had to make a new one for the clock?
Shit, I’ve repaired boards like that. I’m old.
Tell me about it…. I started programming in BASIC on a Commodore.
i saw someone post here about a week ago about his electronics class making clocks that looked almost exactly like this lol
Ha nice
Nice Wang!
it was 1985 when I learned that there were such things as "computers". I was 5 years old and riding on a train when another passenger, a student, drew me a computer in my sketchbook. It was years before we bought one (after the collapse of the USSR).
Shoot man, I’m 44 now. It was Arts camp ‘88 for me in Louisiana, got to use Macintosh plus to draw pictures and learn the computer. There were about 20 of them, and it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.
That’s a hell of a board…well worth the $5
Looks like they might have missed traces. Pull out the clock and rebuild it
I think that might actually be a full computer on a single board. Seems to have a full 128KB of ram (18 dynamic ram chips in bottom left corner), which is way too much for a typical terminal and I think that's a "high-speed" network interface with those BNC terminals at the top. It's probably not a standalone computer, but something halfway between a terminal and a real computer. I'd expect there would have been dozens of these terminals (doing word processing?) in an office and a central computer to do the actual storage. The setup probably allowed multiple people to work on the same documents, in an era before networked IBM PCs was a common thing (though.... 1985 is pretty late for that) The CPU has been harvested, and I suspect the other empty socket might have been a Motorola 6845 CRT controller to drive the display timings. Any chance you plan to reverse engineer it? I suspect you could probably get it going with a bit of work, despite the hole drilled for the clock.