[Coco] AT306 OS9/68000 Computer

Joel Ewy jcewy at swbell.net
Sat Aug 25 22:12:31 EDT 2007


Paul Fitch wrote:
> I recently purchased an AT306 fom Boisy, and I'd like to pick all of your
> brains for info.  
>  
> I've seen this machine refered to as the MM/1b.  Why is that?
>  
>   
Here's the scoop on that.  I assembled memory and I/O boards (well,
would have assembled the I/O boards if they had worked properly, but
that's another story) for the MM/1 on (verbal) contract for Blackhawk. 
David Graham sent me a batch of bare boards, I bought a bunch of
components, and David would call me or email when he needed a board.  I
would solder it up and sell it back to him and he would ship it to the
customer.

Unfortunately, there was a problem with the SCSI circuit on the Version
3.0 I/O boards, and Kevin Pease (and maybe also Ray Patterson) were
trying to sort it out.  But in the meantime, we couldn't sell many MM/1s.

So in order to have something to sell in the mean time, David licensed
the AT306.  What he told me was that he called it the MM/1b because his
OS-9 license from Microware was for the MM/1, which included subsequent
versions or some such.  Or it may have been the driver development kit
that was tied to the MM/1 name.  Of course, about the only hardware
similarity between the two machines was that each processor ran m68000
code.  Presumably nobody was going to check into that too closely.
> It came with a 46 page manual that discusses the form factor of the
> motherboard, the keyboard matrix, and other internals.  Is there any other
> documentation available for this computer?
>  
> Is the CGFx5 lib good for this machine?
>  
> I read that the AT306 came with a port of a unix GUI?  MG-something or
> other.  I also read that it didn't work to well.  
>  
> No K-windows port to it?  Personally, I think that haveing K-Windows
> available on only one of the OSk machines available at the time caused
> unnessary fragmentation in the community.  I think that now.  Then, I had an
> MM/1 and wasn't giving it that much thought.
>  
>   
MGR:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManaGeR
I believe that K-Windows was "being worked on" for the AT306 / MM1b. 
Since I never had one I don't recall whether that ever came to
fruition.  I always really wanted one, because I loved the idea of an
OS-9 machine with an ISA bus.  I so wanted to plug in all those PC
goodies and try to write device drivers for them.

JCE
> OH, and Dave Kelly, are you here?  Boisy says that this used to be your
> machine several years ago.  Please know that I will give it a good home.
>  
>  
>
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>   




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