Re: End of an era?

On 05/05/2010 01:42, Mike Tomlinson wrote:

Snap. :o) There were some wonderful add-ons for the BBC, weren't there?
I had the ATPL Sidewise board (takes machine to 16 ROMs) with the
battery-backed static RAM option, but I also had the two piggy-backed
static RAM chips.

http://www.bygonebytes.co.uk/WEsrb/WEsrb.pdf

I had the watford electronics solderless sidewise expansion board, which mounted itself by standing in the OSROM and ADC sockets, with those parts relocated to sockets on the board itself. Having compatibility with the several PCB releases of the main board by relying on the relative positions of those chips was a brave move.

My watford shadow ram board also squeezed into the same case somehow avoiding it!


, but things like disc drives
and monitors also came out of old office and (for one not very safe
monitor) video gaming machines.

A lot of arcade machine monitors of the time were built on a wire frame
containing a Microvitec monitor, exactly the same as that found in the
ubiquitous boxy Cub monitors used with the BBC.

My monitor find, purchased from a amateur radio club 'junk sale' reverse auction, was a 16inch microvitec open chassis thing given with the circuit diagram that almost matched the encased cub monitors that were sold with the BBC micro. It was just that the single PCB was laid out rather differently. I tastefully 'boarded' up the outside with cardboard and other folk just kept clear of it - my woodworking skills at making a proper safe cabinet were non-existant at the time.

I did a lot with that RGB monitor, being that hacking around with electronics was my main interest. I found through 'Television magazine' a kit for the PAL composite video colour decoder that fitted the BBC Cubs, and sussed out the equivalent 'sandcastle pulse' connections from my Frankenstein beast. With a 'display electronics' telebox as a TV tuner, and then later a mullard teletext decoder board I built up my own teletext colour 'portable' TV, subtitles and overlay, remote control, the works ;-)

I really can claim to have used every
port on my BBC model B at one time or another :-)

Me too. Had the Master Turbo second processor in a Watford adapter box
on my model B, a hard drive on the 1MHz built using the host adapter and
Adaptec SASI/MFM board I found in a junk box at a radio rally for a
quid. :o)

I was then trying to get my head around how the FIFO buffer on the tube interface worked so that I could attach the Master CoPro to the BBC B rather than buy watford's box, but then a Master 128 came my way fairly cheaply at a rally.

Yup, yes it was a Adaptec SASI thing. Funnily I also found a few boards at another radio rally. We weren't digging in the same box? ;-)

The 32k RAM card that gave the Beeb the Master's shadow RAM
facility was easily my best Watford buy. Unbelievably, I got that, a
Torch Z80 card and a fully-tricked out ATPL Sidewise into the BBC case.
Poor power supply must have wondered what had hit it.

I never recased my BBC, though there were plenty of companies that sold wonderful methods of building in the drives and extending the reach of the keyboard. Some folks really did go to town on their kit - ISTR there once was a custom gold plated version offered as a competition prize at one time.

Remember the Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Lurking Horror, Zork, etc?

I remember playing Zork on an Apple-II at college, but my favorate Infocom game remains HHGTTG which I got going on the Master, and in the next decade my Nokia Communicator mobile phone...


Anyway, the interest in DRDOS was short lived when a visit to an auction
bought me a cheap 12MHz 286 PC and sent me along the DOS road of Bill Gates.

Yeah. Before I bought the Beeb, I went down the QL dead-end but soon
realised I'd make a mistake. Unbelievably, Dixons took the machine back
for a full refund against a Beeb. I didn't move on to the Master (too
little, too late) and was never very excited by the Archimedes, so went
the PC route.

I've collected a couple of items of the strange Acorn stuff, but they don't do much at present.

A Reuters APM Board
http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/Reuters.html

A Communicator
http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/Communicator.html


My first PC was an Amstrad 1512 whose monitor had self-immolated, and as
the 1512 base unit was powered from the monitor, I powered it from a
standard PC AT power supply with an adapter cable I made myself to plug
into the weird socket on the back of the 1512. The CGA RGB monitor
output worked with a Philips 8833, but the colours were inverted. Never
bothered making up a board with inverters and got used to working with
black text on a white screen.

Long story of PC upgrades which I'll have to blog one day - before my memory packs up.

Also got a long history of stepping though every video display standard associated with PCs, I rather liked Heurcules and monochome VGA, on a nice paperwhite sharp CRT, like the early Macs had.


These BBC computers are all lying around here at present, but they have
not seen mains juice for some time - must get around to restoring some
of them for posterity (to look at when I'm eighty).

I gave all my BBC stuff - and there was a lot of it - away only a few
weeks ago.

Yup noticed :)

I also had some Apple-II equipment that I really now regret getting rid off (only at the time I never got the disk drives working). There is also a ZX81 somewhere....

I'm a Radio Ham playing the old game, "He who dies with the most junk wins".

Be warned that if you power up a BBC that's been unused for some time,
the class X mains filter cap in the power supply can let go in dramatic
fashion. It makes a lot of impressive smoke but doesn't actually damage
anything. It's a good idea to replace it if you can if it does let go
though, as it prevents noise being injected back into the mains.

Been there funnily enough with my Mum's old sewing machines (she has a few). EMI filters there have been exploding....

--
Adrian C
.

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