Weekend acquisitions (and tiny Imlac update)

A brief departure from Imlac repairs for today (the 18V supply tests fine under load as well -- now onto the main supply...)

Took a drive down to Goldendale, WA this weekend to take a look at some interesting computer junk/stuff that a fellow collector was offloading, and I ended up picking up a few items of note.

A very dirty Motorola EXORmacs development system

The first computer is a Motorola EXORmacs system, with EXORterm 155 terminal.  This is an early 68000-based system (1979/1980, which is about as early as the 68000 goes) primarily meant to be used as a platform for development of other systems that were to use the 68000 processor, but it's a pretty full-featured system itself.  It features the VERSAbus, the grandpappy of the VMEbus which was used in a wide variety of systems. 

The extremely dirty VERSAbus backplane

The picture to the left does not do justice in describing just how filthy this particular computer is.  It is also incapable of capturing the unique odor it emits.  This computer will require a lot of cleaning before I even bring it in the house.  But it is complete, sans any sort of mass storage.  I'm fairly sure it used bog-standard 8" drives so it shouldn't be too incredibly difficult to interface something to it, provided I can find something to run on it to make such an effort worthwhile.  There's precious little information out there about this system, let alone any kind of software.  It did come with a box of documentation, however, and I hope to get that scanned at some point in the not-too-distant future to remedy the lack of info on the 'net.  For now, this system's going to sit in storage until I have some time to disassemble it and give every part a thorough scrubbing.

Interestingly, the EXORterm terminal itself can also be a standalone computer; it has its own backplane (currently empty) that can house EXORbus cards.  As it is, it's just a dumb terminal (but one based on the Motorola 6800 8-bit CPU).

Mini-Micro Designer MMD1

Item two from this weekend is a cute 8080 prototyping board, a Mini-Micro Designer MMD1, from 1977 or so.  I love these early single-board computers for some reason, and I couldn't pass this one up.  The keypad's a bit rough but other than that it's in good shape.  512 bytes of memory (in 4 2111 RAMs) and a very basic monitor (256 bytes) in a 1702 EPROM.  The area on the bottom left is meant to be filled with a breadboard area, but it appears to never have been installed on this one. I haven't powered it up yet (need to find my supply that does 5/12/-12) but I bet it works fine.  And if it does, I can use it to read all of those 1702s I have that I've been wanting to dump.  (1702s are early enough that I've had a heck of a time finding something capable of reading them.)

HP 9000/332

Number three on our computer scavenging operation is an HP 9000/332 workstation, with matching 35731A monochrome monitor.  I believe this machine started life as a 9000/310 -- this was a 10Mhz 68010 based machine.  It has been upgraded to a 16Mhz 68030 machine with 68882 FPU and 4MB of memory.  Sweet!  The keyboard does not appear to be working at the moment (I have a spare somewhere) and I don't have any HP-IB drives on hand to install anything to, but I hope to get NetBSD running on this at some point.

I think I've saved the best for last:  A Metheus Omega 400/DS Display Controller, circa 1983.

The Metheus Ω400 Display Controller (cover removed)

This is an external display interface used in conjunction with a host machine (such as a PDP-11 or a VAX) to produce high-resolution graphics.  The Omega 400 supported a variety of host/processor interfaces, including RS-232 and parallel data interfaces.  The host computer sends the Omega drawing instructions (for points, lines, arcs, polygons, etc) and the Omega 400's bit-slice processor (using good ol' AMD 2901s) would transform them into raster graphics on the fly. 

The Metheus Omega 400-series supported resolutions up to 1024x768 at 256 colors out of a palette of 16.7 million (with a refresh of 33Hz - ouch), with hardware accelerated line, rectangle, arc and polygon rendering, as well as zooming and rasterop support.  This was pretty amazing stuff in 1983 (and it still impresses me)!  As I said before, the processor is built off of AMD 2901s and it's microcoded; the microcode could be updated to accelerate new functionality if needed (I'm unsure if this was documented publicly, however.) 

A close up of the processor memory and logic

I don't know a ton about the history of either Metheus or this particular piece of hardware that they created.  Metheus was based out of Hillsboro, OR and made a number of high end graphics systems (standalone and later for PCs) over the years.  They were bought out by Barco in 1999.

In addition to the Omega 400, I have a number of interface boards (serial and parallel) and an interesting Front End Processor (FEP) board.  I believe that an Omega 400 equipped with this FEP board becomes an "Omega 2000" series -- the FEP board (also referred to as a "Graphics Preprocessor) provides extra hardware interfaces and a higher-level graphic API.  The documentation I have states that the Omega 2500 can draw vectors, characters and filled polygons at a rate of 1.5 million pixels/second. 

The FEP/Graphics Preprocessor board

From the manual's description of the Graphics Preprocessor:

"The purpose of the graphics preprocessor is to translate high level, device independent graphic instructions, such as those described in the Graphical Kernel System (GKS) and the virtual device interface (VDI) specifications, into instructions recognized by the display processor.  In addition to translation, the graphics preprocessor supplies the input/output ports for host and peripheral communications.  Together, the graphics preprocessor constitutes a heirarchical display-list processing system with the following capabilities:

• Segment structures
• 2D transformation and clipping
• Graphics primitives for points, circles, arcs, polygons, polylines, and polymarkers
• Graphics attributes such as color and style
• Graphics text and text attributes such as font and spacing
• Pixel operations
• Input support for locator, pick, and button-type logical devices
• Macro capability
• Keyboard and terminal display window functions"

The FEP's 68000 CPU

I have a very complete set of documentation for this thing; everything from the user manuals to schematics, microcode tutorials and blueprints for building the chassis.

I foresee having a lot of fun with this thing.  I'm thinking of perverse things like, oh, a SWTPC 6800 with a 256 color 1024x768 framebuffer...