Pictures: http://imgur.com/a/wDXnt Basically the trick to getting it working is that it hates commodity hardware. I guess being a Bell Labs product, it's above such pedestrian things as MFM/RLL controllers. More to come as it finds a permanent PC to live in. And, the RIFA caps in the ECL monitor released the magic smoke, so like all good projects it has had its "Will it Smoke?" moment. I have the ROMs/PALs for "pretend to be a MDA" mode. As you can see, it's not this unit's strong point. Thanks, Jonathan
On 1/6/2016 9:17 PM, Systems Glitch via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Pictures:
Basically the trick to getting it working is that it hates commodity hardware. I guess being a Bell Labs product, it's above such pedestrian things as MFM/RLL controllers. More to come as it finds a permanent PC to live in. And, the RIFA caps in the ECL monitor released the magic smoke, so like all good projects it has had its "Will it Smoke?" moment.
I have the ROMs/PALs for "pretend to be a MDA" mode. As you can see, it's not this unit's strong point.
Thanks, Jonathan Tell more... a single board ISA 386? Not much comes up on the intertubes.
Tell more... a single board ISA 386? Not much comes up on the intertubes.
The Blit Express is a high resolution (1664 x 1200 mono, forget the color res) workstation graphics card from Bell Technologies. Similar idea to the Blit terminal. It's a full-length ISA card with DOS and UNIX drivers. It can be used with X on System V/386 UNIX. It's intended to be used with a 286 or 386 computer. I'm guessing there were sort of specific system requirements for it, since it doesn't seem to like MFM/RLL drives, which of course would've been very common then. There's almost no information on the Internet about these. Apparently mine is a beta unit (don't know if they ever made it into production). The most I can find is an old USENET post asking if they were useful, and some magazine reviews. I'll do a full write-up on it and make all of the software and documentation available as I have time. Thanks, Jonathan
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Douglas Crawford -
Systems Glitch