[Coco] Hello, all

[John Donaldson]

Joel,
  I did some work for David too. I wrote KTERM and KRIBBS for the MM/1. 
David and I sold a few
copies at one of the CoCoFest. Sold all the copies I had with me. David 
did not have a working MM/1
at the fest or we could have made more diskettes. I bet my 8Meg board 
came from you. LOL

John Donaldson


Joel Ewy wrote:

>Finally getting around to subscribing to the list.
>  
>  I'm Joel Ewy.  I feel like I know many of you, but I'm not sure  how many of you know me.  When I lived in Elkhart, IN. I went to 2  or 3 of the Chicago fests (97-2000) and I notice Boisy has posted some  pics of me there in 97 chatting with Joel Hegberg.  I've had CoCos  since 1980 (4K).  I've got a couple CoCo 1s, 3 or 4 CoCo 2s, 3 or  4 CoCo 3s, a TC-9 Tomcat (that doesn't work too well) and an MM/1 (as  well as some old Amigas, a fair number of old Macs, and a basement and  now attic overflowing with PC junk.)  I periodically get spurts of  renewed interest in the CoCo and its descendants, and I seem to be in  another one of those phases right now.
>  
>  I don't have many significant CoCo accomplishments to brag about, but I  did once release a couple simple (read: crudely written) OS-9 utils to  take 3 VEF or PIX (DS-69 Digisector) images (R,G,B) and munge them  together into a 15-bit Targa file that could then be further  manipulated on other systems to get a reasonable high-color  image.  I put it out as shareware on Delphi.  If I can dig up  the source I'll re-release it under the GPL FWIW.
>  
>  I also had some CoCo related stuff on the Web from about 95-2000, which  I think is archived at archive.org -- including a picture made with the  aforementioned vef2tga or pix2tga utilities.
>  
>  I also played a small role in the saga of the MM/1.  Round about  95 I think, I called up Blackhawk to order an MM/1.  David Graham  told me he couldn't sell me one right away, because he needed somebody  to stuff I/O and memory/backplane boards.   Oh, Ok.   Hey, wait a minute.  I had spent a couple summers assembling  modules for avionics test equipment at IFR Systems.  I could stuff  those boards!  So I called him back and offered to help.   There was one more catch.  He really needed someone to spring for  some parts.
>  
>  So... I 'borrowed' $1000 from my dad and bought a bunch of components  -- sockets, SCSI controller chips, A/D converters, caps, connectors,  the whole thing.  David shipped me bare PC boards, and I soldered  some up and sold them back to him to sell to the customers.  Only  problem was, Ver. 3.0 of the I/O board didn't work right.  There  were problems with the SCSI interface.  Kevin Pease (I'm told)  thought there was a race conditon in one of the GALs, but nobody seemed  to be able to figure it out.
>  
>  I had bought just the unexpanded MM/1 board, and built my own I/O board  and 8M RAM board from the stock of parts I had, but the SCSI didn't  work, so I couldn't run a hard drive.  Plus I had all these parts  that weren't selling.  We did sell some memory boards though,  because those worked right.  So every couple months David would  call me up and order a memory board or two.  I'd sit down in an  evening and solder one up and ship them off to Oklahoma, or sometimes  directly to a customer, and David would send me a check.   Gradually, the orders came more seldom.
>  
>  I eventually traded an old universal device programmer that couldn't  burn the 22V10 GALs used on one of the MM/1 boards to Ray Patterson  (who did a lot of service work on the MM/1) for an earlier revision of  the I/O board that had working SCSI and got some hard drives to work on  my computer.
>  
>  Though I talked with David on the phone numerous times and corresponded  via email, I only met him once -- at a Chicago CoCo Fest.  Maybe  '98 or '99.  I was working on a cable adaptor that would allow me  to use signals from both parallel ports on the MM/1 to hook up a  Connectix QuickCam.  I was going to use Linux drivers as a  starting point.  But soon after, while trying to wire up a SCSI  Zip drive so I could back up my hard disks, I somehow managed to zap  both of my hard drives.  I lost the code I had been working on for  the QuickCam, possibly also my modifications to Kotanski's (sp?) JPEG  viewer (though I may have posted some version of that to Delphi, I  can't remember), and almost certainly the little bit of work I did on  an HTTP Get command using Chris Hawkes' socket library.  Needless  to say I was frustrated and depressed.  Serves me right for trying  to be responsible and back up my data!  And I haven't heard from  David Graham since that CoCo Fest,
> though I do have sporadic contact  with Ray Patterson.
>  
>  I still have a stack of MM/1 Version 3 I/O boards, a fair number of 8M  memory backplanes, and most of the parts needed to build them up.   The boards themselves belong to Blackhawk, if any such entity still  exists, but the parts are mine.  I would venture to say that if  anybody wants an 8M memory board we could come to some sort of  arrangement.  We should keep a record of the PC boards used, so if  David ever re-emerges from the shadows we can work something out with  him.  But the parts are mine, and I don't think he'd begrudge me  making back a little of what I lost, especially if it helps out other  MM/1 users.
>  
>  And what about the I/O boards?  Anybody interested in taking a  crack at getting the SCSI working?  I'll have to plug one in again  and refresh my memory about what's wrong.
>  
>  Other items of possible interest to some of you:  I got permission  (I don't remember if it was just verbally or in an email) from Joel  Hegberg to take over maintenance and make some kind of public release  of his clipboard library for OS9/68K and KWindows.  He sent me the  source code, but I never got around to doing anything with it before  the great hard drive calamity.  I'm sure it was on floppy  somewhere.  Is the disk still readable?
>  
>  And finally, for the CoCo hackers out there:  I have a small  number (10 or less) of MC68B44 DMA controller chips.  I suspect  these are fairly uncommon.  Were these even manufactured in large  quantities?  It is entirely possible that these were just  engneering samples.  In any case, I haven't had any way to test  them short of wiring up some kind of test circuit and hooking it up to  a CoCo, which I simply haven't done yet.  Is anybody else  interested in playing with such things just for fun?  Even though  they don't seem to be available in any sort of quantities, they could  surely be emulated in an FPGA design or possibly in one of the larger  CPLDs.  The actual parts could be used in a design process for,  say, a new disk controller, where you test an HDL version against the  real McCoy.
>  
>  Oh, and I have source code for the OS-9 portions of Paul T. Burgin's  Dragon Net network software and got permission to hack it for the  CoCo.  He doesn't have the DragonDOS  source anymore, and it  would have to be heavily modified to work on the CoCo anyway.  But  the source to his drivers and file managers is interesting and may have  some use as a skeleton for some kind of CoCo network.
>  
>  Anyway, I'll stop blathering.  I'm in the process of cleaning and  reorganizing, and I need to find a new place to set up my CoCos and  MM/1.  I have put some new hard drives in the MM/1 and am in the  process of seeing if I can recover anything from my CoCo 3's crashed  drive.  If there's any interest in any of the software (or  hardware) artifacts I have I'll see what I can do to share the  CoCo/OS-9 joy.
>  
>  JCE
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