[Coco] coco serial port

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 07 November 2012 21:35:00 Bob Devries did opine:

> "The forgotten chip" That was it!! Thanks, Gene.
 
At my age, I probably would not have remembered it if I hadn't actually 
done it.  All on a small piece of perfboard, just laying under the 
keyboard.  ISTR at the time that I stole the parts out of a DC Modem pack 
that was headed for the bin since it was hard coded for 300 baud.  I ran it 
at 9600, which was 4x faster than the $20k kit Grass was peddling at the 
time.  I sold it to the station for $245, pointing out that it was 4 times 
faster, gave english file names instead of code wheel switched numbers.  I 
wrote the program in my office, so it was on their time.  But when that 
switcher was finally retired, they gave me the whole kit of coco stuff to 
take home.  The only problem(s) I ever had with it were created by Radio 
Shacks refusal to put an underwriters approved 3 pin line cord on all that 
stuff, so about every 10th time we got tapped by a passing electrical storm 
(we were a magnet with a 255 tower 40 feet out the backside door, and the 
whole place sitting on a cubic mile of sandstone) so the emp across a 3 
foot drive cable from ungrounded coco to ungrounded disk drives was the 
demise of several disk controllers over the years.

> Regards, Bob Devries
> Dalby, QLD, Australia
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Gene Heskett" <gheskett at wdtv.com>
> To: <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2012 11:41 AM
> Subject: Re: [Coco] coco serial port
> 
> > On Wednesday 07 November 2012 20:29:28 Douglas Bell did opine:
> >> I was visiting with a friend today about the coco and was bringing
> >> him up to date on all the enchantments that have been developed over
> >> the years.
> >> 
> >> One thing led to another and then he told me about a hardware mod the
> >> made to allow the coco to have a real serial port. Since I'm fairly
> >> new on the seen.
> >> 
> >> Sense the 1980's .   I'm not aware of any mods to the serial port. So
> >> im throwing this out for input,  to see if anyone is interested in
> >> this coming to light again
> >> 
> >> He did tell me it was for a OS9 system. He is not a member of this
> >> news letter yet but he told me to send the link to him. So he will
> >> be on the scene soon.
> >> 
> >> Any response will be forwarded to him till he joins.
> > 
> > There was a conversion kit that could be fairly easily applied to a
> > coco/coco2 way back when.  I put one of them into a coco2 and used it
> > for about 14 years talking to a Grass Valley Group 300-3a/b
> > production television switcher at WDTV-tv.  For what I asked it to
> > do, it Just Worked(TM).  And did the main job 4x faster than Grasses
> > own $20,000 kit accessory, and gave the tech directors file names
> > instead of code numbers the $20k kit gave.
> > 
> > The article is in The Rainbow, search the archive index for "The
> > Forgotten Chip" article.
> > 
> > AFAIK, no one ever actually made a commercial kit and sold it based on
> > that
> > (someone should have), but it sure was just what the Dr. ordered for
> > me as it allowed me to write troubleshooting routines in Basic09 that
> > could reach
> > into that complex beast and exercise the troublesome portion of the
> > circuit
> > until I could determine the exact chip I needed to replace.  It took
> > time to write that software of course, but in the overall scheme of
> > things it sped me up quite a bit.
> > 
> >> Douglas Bell
> >> 
> >> www.papermoneyworld.net
> > 
> > Cheers Douglas, Gene
> > 
> > --
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> > Coco at maltedmedia.com
> > http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
> 
> --
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> Coco at maltedmedia.com
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Cheers, Gene
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