On Mon, Jul 15, 2024 at 09:56:14PM +0100, Joshua Rice via cctalk wrote: > https://imgur.com/a/GjiB44R > For all of those not in the group, images above.
The back connectors are a couple of BNC connectors marked "VID [obscured]" and "VID1" so we can assume video, and a DB-25 with three wires connected to pins 2, 3, and 7, so clearly RS-232. There's also some sort of connector to the right of the board but it's cropped and I can't tell if it's exposed to the outside world or what might be plugged into it. It's 2x16 and looks like a boxed pin header. On the board inside, the right hand side is a Z80 with 32K of static RAM and probably an EPROM (a handwritten label obscures the part number), and the left hand side towards the BNC connectors is another 3x8K of static RAM and another EPROM and a lot of discrete TTL including counters. So the right is the computer, and the left is a bespoke video system which I reckon is character mapped due to the EPROM which would contain character bitmaps. The existence of a second crystal and a trimmer next to the video side suggests colour rather than monochrome video. (The two video outputs might mean it offers both.) Doing video the hard way like this seems bizarre since it's how one would do things in the 70s or very early 80s -- an MC6845 replaces all of that discrete logic and was definitely available by 1981 because it's in IBM's MDA card -- yet the date code on the parts indicate this machine was built some time in the early 1990s. (The 32K SRAM is an outlier at 1994, but perhaps it was replaced.) The "MADE IN GERMANY" label supports this theory: it's not "MADE IN WEST GERMANY" so the machine postdates October 1990. I am inclined to believe this is a low-cost serial terminal rather than a general-purpose computer. 8-bit computers were obsolete by 1990 in Western Europe, and even the former communist states wanted Amigas, Atari STs etc rather than Western e-waste. Nobody would try and launch a completely novel 8-bit computer in 1990. (Except MGT, of course, and I'd love to have a Sam Coup� to play with but the prices are utterly insane.) Were it not for the edge connector I'd be certain it's a terminal, but the pin header can expose enough of the CPU that one could bodge on a floppy controller or whatever is needed to make the thing useful as a computer. However, 8-bit computers which had floppy drives as an optional extra would had a tape interface instead, which this thing doesn't have, so I still don't think it's a computer. ... but I'm still mystified as to who in Germany would make a standalone serial terminal in 1990 which still needs you to add some sort of external display. Maybe it's for a dialup service, but it's not like France wasn't handing out Minitel terminals like sweeties years earlier, and the UK similarly had Prestel which you could access via e.g. a terminal emulator on a BBC Micro or a bespoke terminal which was more polished than this device. Even with the knowledge that it is almost certainly a serial terminal, I can't find anything useful about it. I don't even understand why this anachronism would even exist. No wonder it has apparently disappeared without leaving a trace in the history books. How about giving it to a museum so they can tear their hair out trying to figure out where it came from? ;)
