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IMSAI Series Two
Dino writes "You can actually pre-order a new IMSAI here. These folks bought the rights to produce the IMSAI in the late seventies, and provided the unit used in Wargames. It has a genuine S100 bus, but also has modern features as well, the most interesting being a driver that will allow you to access an ATX motherboard via the parallel port as a disk drive."
I remember being really impressed when the dude broke out with the 8-inch floppies in WarGames. I even remember that they were Elephant brand on the sleeve. Most of the stuff he did on the computer was possible too. The war dialer, the awful speech synthesis (although for some reason it improved halfway through the movie as if the dude learned how to talk correctly), the acoustic modem, etc. Even the trick he used on the door to the infirmary seems like it would be possible but I'm not an EE so I wouldn't know for sure. Definately a great movie.
it's a cluster of computers that wanders off into the mountains, kills an ice monster and then later gets killed by that monster's relatives. i've never known what the big deal about it is, really.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I see that they're offering it for a kilobuck...remember when that was the price of a 64K Ithaca Intersystems S100 bus RAM card kit?
Some people are into computers because they have a pure thirst for knowledge. These people learn things that are useful, and things that are useless...its all part of the same continuum for these people. To those that do, computers are toys. They may be apt to learn php or AmigaDOS. This doesn't mean they often will forego something useLESS at the expense of learning something useFULL. But time permitting, its fun to tinker... It used to be that the computer field was filled with enthusiasts who knew their shit. But ever since the unwashed masses learned there was a paycheck attached to this knowlege, the industry was inundated with carpetbaggers who don't know what the fuck they are doing. But these carpetbaggers get jobs anyway, because they have MCSEs or A(asshole)+ certs... So are you just collecting a paycheck, bub? I would assume not, or I doubt you would be on this site. Which is why I am a little puzzled, I suppose...
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
My uncle had built the thing from a kit, and then we inheritted it. We didn't quite have to key in binary code on the front panel (although it was a good exercise), but I DO remember being excited about getting a used 32K S-100 memory card up at the Trenton Computer Festival (do they still have those?). We started off with a cassette interface and a 64x16 character monochrome display. Eventually added two 'hard-sector' 5-1/4 inch floppies (about 100K each). The processor got upgraded from the original 8080 to an 8085 and later a Z-80. We also built a TMS9918A-based video card (that was a pretty neet chip - wasn't it used in the Colecovision or something?) and I later built a MIDI interface for it. This was all back in the early/mid-eighties. A BSEE, MSEE, and 15 years of experience later, I still learned a lot of what I use on a regular basis on that machine.
> controll my battlebot guard dog while chowning my neighbors' cat?
Any cat can be chown'd with a sufficient supply of tuna.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
Does it play "Global Thermonuclear War"? That looked like a great game.
With a 20 MHz CPU and the expanded instruction set of the Z8 processor, it should also be able to spool hundreds of biorhythm charts out to my daisywheel in seconds and run Hunt the Wumpus really fast. This is nice!
I wonder if they're going to update CP/M to support all that RAM transparently. That would be sweet.
...I think Z-System, a CP/M-compatible operating system for Z80's that was made in the '80s, could indeed handle as much RAM as you'd managed to make the system address. I ran it on a TRS-80 Model 4 that had a processor upgrade card on it that used a HD64180, a relative of the Z180, and 384K of RAM. Hey, you laugh, but for a while I ran a BBS on it--since I could load the entire OS, BBS software and database indexes for 800+ messages into RAM, it ran faster than a lot of the PC BBS's of the day.
The "new IMSAI" looks like a machine I'd have loved about a decade ago, back when some ex-CP/M hackers had designed a Z180-based Z-System machine on a Baby-AT motherboard that used the XT bus. As I recall the official name was the "PC-Z" but they referred to it informally as the "Grudge." (Which of course led to someone suggest they should make a portable version and call it the "Pet Peeve.")
No, as fond as I am of reminiscing, I don't think I'll buy a new IMSAI, in case anyone asks. If I ever miss the old days, I break out a TRS-80 emulator, play a few rounds of an arcade game in its glorious 128x48 resolution, and remember that even if people pushed hardware to the limit those days in a way that they don't now, that doesn't mean it'd be much fun to go back.
You get a nice built in keyboard, an lcd display,
and it'll sync up to your real computer.
From there you can program your Z80 in assy, C, or basic. Heck, you can even download a basic interpretter onto your little palm-top/pda.
Experience the joys of accessing memory, indirectly indexing, and jumping back and forth.
And save $900 in the process!
So yeah, this is cute, but as dumb as a box of rocks. You can get those microprocessor notebook-style trainers for a couple of hundred bucks (check mouser.com ), not 9!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
What Linux port? I'm hoping they offer CP/M 2000 or CP/M XP.
Someone needs to remind these guys what year it is. Had something like this come out in 1977 or so it would have been a competitive product. The problem is that it is 25 years later now and while Star Wars might not look too dated this thing sure does. S-100 systems and CP/M have been dead since before a good majority of the slashdot community were even born. Is there some reason why I should now shell out a thousand dollars for an S-100 system? For that kind of money I could get a Sun Blade 100, build myself a pretty decent Athlon system, or get my car's transmission fixed.
This product surely belongs in the more dollars than sense catagory.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Your geek and nerd cards are revoked immediately. Someone who doesn't know what an IMSAI or S-100 bus is just cannot be a geek or nerd.