Microchip buys Hi-Tech Software

You may be surprised to hear that I have MDOS09 running as a PPC emulated task in a DPS window today - and I still have some use for some of the software I had written in the mid-80s for my first design, a 6809 based thing which had its own bus and own disk and monitor ROM and ran MDOS09 (and MDOS with a CPU card with the 6800, but I do not have that emulated). I also still sometimes run under it Herve Tirefords Basicm, a very nice flavour of Basic.

Dimiter

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Reply to
didi
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The Metrodata was a weird system. It looked like a simple text processor, but you had to log into the proper 'page' to edit the text for each of the six video cards. Some cards had three pages, like the leased line AP news feed. You had 'Page Title" 'Body' and 'Bottom'.

The cheap bastard who ran that CATV system was too cheap to spend $8 each for new 8" floppies. He put it off for a couple months, till both the main disk drive lost the heads when they welded to the worn media, but the backup disk in the secondary drive had crashed. I spent almost a week piecing the system configuration back together from almost 100 bad disks. The home office 'suggested' that the PM schedule I insisted on be met every month, if the manager wanted to keep his job.

I am not surprised that a 6800 family computer is still working. I think i still have a couple Tandy/RS Color Computers around. I had a pair of ISA cards for the XT that let you run Apple II software from an Apple disk drive.

Some of the last embedded systems I worked on used the MC68340, and I hated the early production with the PGA package. The SMD version was a ot easier to troubleshoot, and modify for special products. BTW, one of those boards is part of the KU band communication systems aboard the ISS.

The other embedded controller used a Cyrix 586 PC104 based motherboard, and a dozen small Motorola MPUs. It had a 40 MB solid state hard drive, and 32 MB of DIMM RAM to run the Telemetry system under Windows CE.

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

$8

Whoa, that beats my 8" floppy disk adventures. Back in the day - on that first 6809/00 based thing I had built - I had two such drives, Bulgarian clones of some Shugart original, I believe. They failed frequently enough to teach me that I needed one disk and *two* backups minimum (after I had the situation you describe, work disk failure and bad backup). I had learned where around the head to press with fingers etc. during retries, it was the nightmare you probably know all too well.

I retired the real thing not so long ago, 2-3 years ago IIRC (when I found the month to write the emulator). Not bad for a 6809 oldie I had built in 1988 as an update to my first thing which predated that by perhaps 3-4 years.

d I

f

I started with the SMD one, designed it into my first "nukeman" in

1993/4. But mine did not make it to the ISS, just a few sold units. Was a nice CPU in its day, still in production, BTW. I have replaced it with PPC processors some years back (around 2000), though.

Dimiter

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Reply to
didi

This had the original Shugart 8" drives, but the replacements were a newer model, and every time one went bad we had to reconfigure the replacement, since SMS did a sloppy design. The two drives & controller boards filled a 120 pound rackmount package that appeared to have been a desktop word processor or typesetting system. Metrodata designed a Exorcisor buss interface card to connect it ti the proprietary SMS interface.

The original embedded controller was designed for the Microdyne 700 &

1620/1670 series of Telemetry receivers. It was modified for limited production Sat antenna controller for NAsA tracking stations. The one aboard the ISS was in a 700 series receiver.

BTW, SMS was 'Scientific Memory Systems'

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

I know, I have one :-). But not a 1581.... (3.5")

Regards,

Ross..

Reply to
Ross Vumbaca

At some point towards the end of my undergraduate days, I got it into my head to built a rack-mounted Commodore 64 with a 1541, 1581, and printer interface. I didn't have that much money, although I did have access to a machine shop, so the thing ended up in a pair of large bud boxes screwed together with a beige front panel -- the faces of the drives poking out through milled holes.

After putting it all together, I never really did use it. And it weighed a ton -- those 1541 transformers were heavy!

It's sitting in my parents' basement these days. I know a lot of that sort of thing you can't even give away these days, but I should probably try next time I visit to find someone on, e.g., comp.sys.cbm who wants such a beast...

I think there's an old Amiga 500 down in the basement too... and my brother's Amiga 3000 is sitting in the utility room, next to an HP 28C calculator, that both haven't moved since the early-'90s when he moved out of the house!

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

I got a 1581 some where around here.

it's been a while since I've seen that unit operate :)

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Reply to
Jamie

Note that the A3000 has a Ni-Cd battery sitting on the motherboard (left side), and it will almost definitely leak and damage the motherboard if it's not removed. If it has already leaked, you can remove the battery and try to clean up the mess that it has left, the machine will usually be repairable (depending on the level of corrosion).

These batterys tend to start leaking once the machine is not used for a long time.

Regards,

Ross..

Reply to
Ross Vumbaca

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