Re: Open source hardware

[John Bradford <john@grabjohn.com>]

> Oh, BTW remember the Apple ][? One could get all hardware docs for that
> bocs, schematics for the entire circuit, the works. That made it very easy
> to build clones, and some people did that, turned out, those were not much
> cheaper that apple's original box....

Yeah, the docs were on fold-out sheets at the back of the manual!  I
think I even had schematics for the floppy disk controllers.  the
Apple ][ was a really nice machine - I remember I had, (infact, still
have, although I haven't powered it on for around 10 years!), the
following peripherals in mine:

Slot 0 - Language card
Slot 1 - 16K RAM card
Slot 2 - Empty
Slot 3 - Z80 processor
Slot 4 - Third disk controller
Slot 5 - Second disk controller
Slot 6 - First disk controller
Slot 7 - PAL encoder

I only had four floppy drives, so the third disk controller was never
used.  I didn't have an 80-column card, nor a serial interface :-(,
but I did have *** 96K *** of RAM!!!  Truely the power of a mainframe
on the desktop...  Almost.

John.