Jim's collections: microdata 1600

Showing posts with label microdata 1600. Show all posts

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

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Basic Four board set

This seems to be a 16 bit Basic Four processor set. It's in unusable condition (most likely), and hopefully will yield up the firmware at least.

The possibility it being a 16 bit superset of the 1600 is due to it having 4 74181 ALU chips. It was designed just shy of the advent of the 2901, which I believe was the next step in the Basic Four / MAI designs of CPUs.

There are 4 total boards in the scrap set, one with the firmware (Intel mask roms), the board with the 74181's (probably the Data board) one with a lot of logic, and a final one with two large connectors out the back (maybe a path to control panel)?

Will have to see if anyone has more Basic Four information.

Firmware chips.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Cincinatti Millacron 900-v2 Backplane

This is a backplane for a Cincinatti Millacron CNC control computer. It contains a licensed copy of the Microdata 1600 built by CM. It was used in a variety of machine tools by CM. I have seen it used in a mill at least.

The name of this control was Acramatic. Acramatic applies to a variety of control system designs by CM. I am not familiar with their user interface of designs to know how they evolved them, but the 1600 was gradually evolved by CM.

The original 1600 they used had a standard Microdata cpu set, firmware board, used 8, 16, and 32k cores. Most of the Ampex and CDC 32k x 9 memories are from the CM controls, and sell for considerably more because the tools as still in use.

CM replaced the original 1600 with an enlarged cpu set, integrating higher integrated DIP technology, and early PAL parts, etc. The firmware moved onto that design from being on a separate card.

Next to go was the memory, with core being replaced by mos memory board.

Finally the design replaced the 1600's backplane, cardcage and formfactor, and went to bitslice designs though perhaps still retained some compatability of function.

Still need to study the backplane to see what parts of the backplane zones are common with the 1600.