Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Rosscomp tape drive.


This probably the only one of these around now.  At one point, I think Sanyo (Sangyo in Japan) took over Rosscomp and a smaller 5 1/4" drive.  I don't have one of those.  This one was the last US assembled drive and was a proprietary interface.  Also it was an 8" short form factor.

The 5 1/4 drives made by Sanyo had a SCSI interface, but were stillborn, too late, and the contractors couldn't make the firmware work.

Here are a couple of LA times articles from 1985 when Rosscomp was circling the drain, and started to sell off parts of itself.

Article mentioning the president of the company at the time, Rod Hosilyk.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-01-03-fi-11303-story.html

Sold an interest to Sanyo (Nissho Iwai Corp)
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-01-17-fi-7913-story.html

Infoworld article for this drive (160mb)
Says the interface was SA1400

Address was 16443 Valley View Ave, Cerretos, Ca which is now a vacant lot.





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Monday, December 23, 2019

4K or 8K core board



This has a sub core array board on a carrier which says Standard Memory.

CM-8

Standard Memories  4K in the Part number

CM-8 on the carrier board

Friday, December 13, 2019

S 100 board load for a Friday night


I bought a Vista Card some weeks ago, and need to figure out what it is.  Main reason for it was that it was made here in Santa Ana, CA and Vista was bought out by Dave and Tom Freeman and operated with Advanced Computer Products for a long time.

Steve who had these boards had a bunch of other boards, and I bought most of the Compupro / Godbout stuff he had.  Also there was a Tarbell Double Density floppy controller.

And for good measure there was an SA-1000 / ST506 controller which will be fun if I can get it running with Dave Geswein's 506 emulator.  Will be a whole new dimension on S100 computing.


Godbout Ram 17 64K Static

Vista Board

Godbout Econoram II 8K

Godbout Ram17 64K static

Godbout Econram II 8K

XCOMP SA1000 / ST506 Interface

Tarbell double density floppy controller

Vista Board logo


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Thursday, October 24, 2019

Microdata Reality system


This Reality system was acquired 9/2017 from a fellow in northern California.

It contains a Reflex 2 drive,  64K of memory, 8 ports, printer controller.

Not photographed is the Cipher 100X half inch drive, which was removed for transport.

The side skins and rear skins were discarded and not transported.  The front door is present for transport, may not be saved.

Note the color.  Most of the early "Royale" and 6000 core systems had this yellowish red color, rather than the light beige color of the later 6000 and 8000 systems.

System as deliverd

Field Service tag

Reflex drive

Reflex II drive 120mb

System info tag

64K system

Reflex Controller

shot of the disk controller (in error)

SMD radial cable connection

4 16K memory boards

Reflex SMD to 2951 adapter board

Front panel