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Tube❄️Time

let's pop the top and see how this thing can run MS-DOS. now that's a rather long expansion card there on the right...
13 Jan 2023 at 3:58 | Open on mastodon.social
10 comments
Tube❄️Time

it is a PC Transporter card! there are a bunch of custom chips on the board. CGA graphics, glue logic, floppy controller...

an long and narrow expansion card with lots of chips and a skein of cables coming out of the right edge
13 Jan 2023 at 4:01 | Open on mastodon.social
Tube❄️Time

the CPU on the card is an NEC V30. it is a faster clone of the Intel 8086. the ceramic chip you can see on the left is an 8087 floating point coprocessor.
13 Jan 2023 at 4:03 | Open on mastodon.social
Tube❄️Time

oddly, the floppy chip is from Apple. the part number is 010-0101-0, which is a special floppy controller chip that supports both GCR (standard Apple II) and MFM. the card has a separate 19-pin floppy port.

VGC7240-0684 010-0101-0 ©ⓂAPPLE 1987
13 Jan 2023 at 4:08 | Open on mastodon.social
yakkoj 🦊

@tubetime thats the SWIM chip (or some version of it), with Woz's GCR stuff and Wendell Sander's MFM stuff on it. Wendell had been running The Engineering Department, which did work leading up to this PC Transporter.

13 Jan 2023 at 4:36 | Open on fosstodon.org
bitsavers.org

@tubetime

It isn't jumping out at me, but wasn't the card designed by the Engineering Department (ie. the Saunders)

13 Jan 2023 at 4:41 | Open on oldbytes.space
Tube❄️Time

@bitsavers ahh that explains a lot. the card really feels like it was designed by Apple so i figured it was done by ex-Apple engineers.

13 Jan 2023 at 5:18 | Open on mastodon.social
DELETED replied to Tube❄️Time

@tubetime @bitsavers
So apple engineers in 1987 producing an MS DOS card for the apple ii

Wonder how hard it'll be to make a Macintosh card for the apple ii

13 Jan 2023 at 18:01 | Open on tech.lgbt
AJ

@tubetime ooooh you got one of the ones with the ~weird ram~. Mine is the deeply normal looking one. I really want to hunt down one of the early gold chip models.

13 Jan 2023 at 7:25 | Open on toot.nclf.net
F4GUK Kryss

@tubetime
I think i still have2 of them in my atic.

13 Jan 2023 at 17:47 | Open on pewtix.com
Jon Hendry

@tubetime

Think you could hack an ISA slot onto the PC Transporter card? Then you could put a Quapple card in your PC in your Apple II.

14 Jan 2023 at 1:34 | Open on hachyderm.io
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