[tech] Project "What is this thing?" #2

Felix von Perger frekk at ucc.asn.au
Thu Jun 7 13:57:31 AWST 2018


Dear tech subscribers,

As many of you know, there are a lot of old-looking computery things 
stored around the clubroom, and newer members (such as myself) often 
don't have any idea what they are or why they are there.

I'll try to send out emails on a fairly regular basis, each with photos 
of items found on shelves or under desks. If you recognise the object in 
question, or if you know anything about its history, then please reply 
to this email and contribute to the project by answering any of the 
following questions:

  * What is it? Does it have a name?
  * What vintage is it, when was it made and when was it donated?
  * Who was involved in using, breaking, fixing or building it?
  * What was it used for? What can it do? What is its story?
  * If essential parts are missing from the photos, where might they be?
    What did they do and what do they look like?
  * Does it still work? How do you use it? Is there any existing
    documentation?
  * Is it worth keeping? Why does the club need it? Would anyone want it
    if the club is going to throw it out?

The information gathered from this project will be made available on the 
main wiki page <http://wiki.ucc.asn.au/ProjectWhatIsThat>. As more items 
are documented, I will make a new wiki page for each item and add a link 
to it on the main project page.

Thank you for your contributions and I hope that this project will be 
informative and entertaining for everyone involved.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The second instalment of this series resulted in what was allegedly part 
of the "original" Murphy (or murphies) being dragged out from under the 
desks.

After filling a whole carton with 8" disks that were previously stacked 
inside of the box and a lot of dusting, this was the result. The text on 
the middle handwritten label on the AM-500 front panel reads "Sealed by 
[JMJ] Do not open!!!!".

The case has a number of ports on the side, a number of scarily large 
capacitors in the bottom of the case and an empty S-100 backplane.



Does anyone know what boards would have been installed in this box and 
what might have happened to them? Understandably to boot it must have 
had storage of some kind or some kind of ROM (if it was even a computer 
on its own). Specifically regarding this blue box, is it worth anything 
to the club and if it were to be thrown away would anyone want it (or 
want to sell it for us)?

Next to "murphy" under the desk was the computery thing with a wooden 
case. It seems like the power button needs a key to operate (anyone know 
where that might be? :P). Fortunately the case is reasonably airtight so 
everything inside was in a relatively dust-free condition.

Talking to [JVP] confirmed that the 8" disk drive in this box was one of 
the original drives used by Murphy (and uses a voice-coil actuated head 
and electronic disk ejection), although apparently was not originally 
used in this particular hardware configuration.



Loose inside the case was a single 8" floppy drive, a plastic bag 
containing a stack of paper documentation including a description of the 
S-100 bus, a transparent sheet of plastic with what appears to be the 
original mask/artwork used to create the green-grey circuit board 
visible at the front of the photo on the left (below) and a loose 50pin 
cable that looks like it could be used to connect to the floppy drive.


The wooden box seems to have a full assortment of boards mounted on its 
backplane (including what looks like a handmade diagnostics board, two 
CPU boards (connected by ribbon cable), 4*16K memory boards, a disk 
controller (complete with ROM to boot from floppy) and an IO board (6 
serial ports according to [JVP]).

Is this a full Alpha Micro computer and could it be possible to power it 
on? If one were to test, what steps would be necessary to ensure that 
any failing/failed components do not cause damage to the rest? When was 
it last powered on successfully? Also, what hardware and software would 
be required to get it to boot and produce an output of some sort?

Hopefully this raises some interesting discussions and I appreciate any 
time you may be able to devote to having a look.

Thank you for your contributions,

Felix von Perger
UCC Secretary 2018
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