A homebrew system.
This design is aimed at capatibility with existing standards of the time
and uses an S-100 bus, and runs a commercial operating system (CP/M 2.2).
The hardware design takes advantage of the Z-80's ability to support
automatic refresh of dynamic RAM. This system presumes the use of a supporting
serial terminal (System Orion in this case) and has no display card.
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This second generation system eschews the separate box approach
and is a rack-mount design with an austere front panel.
We couldn't lose the teak theme though.
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Room for 3 S-100 cards. Extra jumper support I/O connections
and specialty parallel I/O for PROM burners.
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A home-made card cage for standard S-100 cards.
On the left side is a home build power supply, with excessively
large capacitors.
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There's the Z80 CPU, the largest package on the board. The gold
topped 64Kx1 dyanmic RAM packages are also visible.
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Wire wrap continues to be the technique of choice, visible here on the
back of the CPU board.
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This I/O board includes the floppy disk controller (in the center)
and some serial interface packages for the serial ports.
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Two surplus 8-inch floppy drives and another scavenged power supply
provide random access storage to rid us of the serialized cassette
storage. This last addition to the system is still in prototype
form and never receieved it's proper rack enclosure.
Can you believe I paid $250 for a surplus 8-inch drive
in the early 1980's!!!
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The full assembly of components, placed in a wheeled rack with
build in power strips, all build from surplus parts installed
into a simple rack given to me by a friend. Those big side handles
make it possible for two people to carry this assembly easily.
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