rogues galleries

>  So what do some of the starrier UK and mainland
> European machines go for? Heck which are they? All I

Well, Some of the more interesting UK machines are  :


Jupiter Ace. OK, the build quality and hardware design are
horrible (thin 
plastic case, rubber keyboard, bus multiplexers consisting
of 3-state 
outputs against normal TTL with 1k resistors in series (!)).
But it's one 
of the few (maybe only) home computers to have Forth rather
than BASIC in ROM

RML380Z. A CP/M box built in loads of PCBs interconnected by
a ribbon 
cable that carries the system bus and power. How they got it
to work I 
don't klnow. Common in schools before the BBC micro.

Acoon BBC micro. You must know about this one...

But what about : 

Acorn Cambridge Workstation. Take a BBC B+ mainboard (64K
RAM). Put it in 
a monitor-style case with a Microvitec Cub colour monitor
chassis, a 
floppy drive and a hard drive. Now add a 32016 second
processor board 
with 4M RAM. It can run either an a 32016 box (runs PANOS)
with the Beeb 
for I/O or as a normal-ish BBC micro (thrre's a swtich on
the keyboard to 
enable/disable the 32016).

Torch XXX. Torch started out making add-ons for the BBC
micro, and it 
shows in that one of the expansion buses on this machine is
a cut-down 
BBC 1MHz bus (hrre used for the internal modem card IRC).
The other 2 
buses being SCSI and VME. The XXX is a 68000 machine running
unix with a 
graphical frontend. Somewhat strange, it claims to be
user-friendly (it 
was around at the time of the first Macs), but if you're not
careful you 
end up at a shell prompt. The power switch is a touch swtich
on the front 
of the machine, when you touch it to power down the unit, it
syncs the 
file system then turns off the mains.

ICL PERQ AGW3300. This is a true ICL design, not a 3RCC one.
It's a 68020 
unix box with a graphics processor built from a pair of
29116s 

-tony

Tony Duell wrote:
>>  So what do some of the starrier UK and mainland
>> European machines go for? Heck which are they? All
I
> 
> Well, Some of the more interesting UK machines are  :

And the Whitechapel, I'd say - OK, so it's just a Unix
workstation, but there 
weren't many people around at the time prepared to commit
themselves to the 
32000 line of CPUs.

cheers

Jules

> 
> Tony Duell wrote:
> >>  So what do some of the starrier UK and
mainland
> >> European machines go for? Heck which are they?
All I
> > 
> > Well, Some of the more interesting UK machines are
 :
> 
> And the Whitechapel, I'd say - OK, so it's just a Unix
workstation, but there 
> weren't many people around at the time prepared to
commit themselves to the 
> 32000 line of CPUs.

The later Whitechapel Hitec series used MIPS R2000 CPUs
IIRC. 

Odd machines. Theres' a motherboard with the PC/AT form
factor, but the 
CPU isn't on it. It actually contains serial, SCSI, ST412,
floppy, 
keyboard, etc interfaces. There are 8 expansion slots. 3 are
16 bit ISA, 
the other 5 are DIN 41612 connectors. One takes the CPU
board (which also 
has MMU and some more serial ports), another takes the video
board, the 
remaing 3 take RAM cards.

I have one complete machine, not in an original case, but in
a standard 
PC/AT tower case. And quite a few spare boards in various
states of 
complete-ness.

Oh and a word of warning  for the 32016-based MG1
Whitechapels. The 
mainboard has 512K RAM, but the boot ROM needs 1.5M to boot.
If it 
doesn't find it, it flashes out a 'multiple bit DRAM error'
on the 
diagnostic LED. You then go insane trying to find a
non-existant fault in 
the memory, memory control, or arbitration circuitry. Please
don't ask 
how I found this out...

-tony

Tony Duell wrote:
> The later Whitechapel Hitec series used MIPS R2000 CPUs
IIRC. 

Hmm, I've never seen a Hitec - just the MG-1 and the CG-200.

> I have one complete machine, not in an original case,
but in a standard 
> PC/AT tower case. And quite a few spare boards in
various states of 
> complete-ness.

Was the case based on the one used for the 32xxx machines?
Or something 
totally different? (Google is proving no help!)

> Oh and a word of warning  for the 32016-based MG1
Whitechapels. The 
> mainboard has 512K RAM, but the boot ROM needs 1.5M to
boot. 

Ha ha - that's interesting. I wonder why they did it that
way? (I mean, why 
put any memory on the mainboard itself if the system's
always going to require 
expansion boards anyway).

For some reason the MG-1 always makes me think "poor
man's NeXT" 

cheers

J.

[Whitechapel Hitec]

> Was the case based on the one used for the 32xxx
machines? Or something 
> totally different? (Google is proving no help!)

I have no idea, I've never seen an original case.

But the motherboard is PC/AT form factor, with the standard
12 pin PC/AT 
power connector, 8 expansion connecotors at the normal
spacing, a DIN 
socket for the keyboard where you'd expect it, and so on. My
guess is 
that they used a plain PC/AT case

> 
> > Oh and a word of warning  for the 32016-based MG1
Whitechapels. The 
> > mainboard has 512K RAM, but the boot ROM needs
1.5M to boot. 
> 
> Ha ha - that's interesting. I wonder why they did it
that way? (I mean, why 
> put any memory on the mainboard itself if the system's
always going to require 
> expansion boards anyway).

Maybe earlier boot ROMs would work with just 512K or
something.

-tony