[Coco] 6 Chip 6809 Computer

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 02 March 2015 18:02:04 Tormod Volden wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 10:19 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > On Monday 02 March 2015 16:01:52 Bill Nobel wrote:
> >> Actually I had to go through a few sources I am going 6309 for my
> >> build.  I found the CPU’s and the 68b50 on ebay, the Crystal,
> >> max232 and 74LS00 from Mouser and the Ram & eprom from Futurlec.com
> >
> > The last time I ordered anything from futurelec, I got burned on the
> > exchange rate.  They advertise on the web page that the price is
> > stated in USD, then they bill your COD at AUD, so I wound up paying
> > almost $200 for 3 interface cards that advertised for $28 USD each. 
> > Advertised as drivers included, yeah, for win-3.1 in some dialect of
> > what I think was C, but it wasn't translatable by any compiler I
> > had.  Even the cd's seemed not to be 100% iso9660 format.
> >
> > Emails to them squawking about it were never answered. They had my
> > money and thats all that counted.  I hope you don't get burned too
> > Bill.
>
> I have ordered from futurlec several times, paying with credit card,
> without any payment trouble or surprises. The only problem is that
> they can be really slow, and that parts are not in stock even if their
> website says so. Once they sent me wrong parts, but as soon as I told
> them they sent the right ones for free. I didn't know they offer COD,
> anyway COD is always much more expensive, also since the courier
> service will take its cut. I don't see how the exchange rate had
> anything to do with it though, especially since 1 AUD is less than 1
> USD.
>
> Tormod

This was something in excess of 15 years ago, and the AUD was worth about 
0.88 USD at the time.  Those 3 I/O cards, with 3 80C55's on each one for 
72 I/O lines per card, with the COD charges, were to be shipped at 
around $90 at the time I made the final click.  The COD was used because 
they could not take a credit card from the US.

It took about 7 weeks to get here, and the COD was slightly less than 
$200, so I had to go to the bank the next morning as I didn't have that 
much cash on me. $193 is the figure that _seems_ to ring a bell. And I 
never did actually use them in a machine as emc didn't have a driver for 
that chip/card.  I spent a month writing one that could move a small 
stepper at about 2 rpms.  Machinery needs 1500+.

Crying in my beer on the list, I got an offer from someone to write a 
driver if I'd send him 2 of them, he would write the real time driver 
and send me back 1 of the two with the driver.  So I did send two, never 
saw nor heard from him again.  One of them may be laying around in the 
vicinity of the pool table in the basement yet.  To me, 15+ years later, 
it's a shrug, but I just wanted to tell others that they do indeed bear 
watching.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>