I Got IMSAI 8080 and CompuPro 1970s S-100 Computers!
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- Опубликовано: 19 май 2022
- I had an unbelievable opportunity to pick up some dream tier computers that I'm excited to introduce here! But I've been down this road before, so this time I also want to focus on exactly what my next steps are to get these running and how I'm making progress on that.
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Nostalgia time. I used to own an IMSAI 8080 when I was younger (I'm 69 now). I remember my first program was written in 8080 assembly language and hand translated into binary before entering it using the paddle switches.
That was the start of a long career in embedded software. Fun times.
Sounds like me, I'm 69 too. I built an IMSAI from kit in 1976 and used it for years. I still have it stored away-- and I believe it is still fully working, I brought it out and fired it up not too long ago and it was then anyway. One thing though is that not all of the edge connectors were gold plated or grip the cards that firmly, along with some connector oxidation, moving the IMSAI usually requires re-seating the S100 cards which may have been jostled to the point a good connection has to be re-established.
@@SyncopatorEven worse for the original Altair 8800 with didn't even use a solid motherboard/backplane, just connectors on ribbon cables.
Just like the one in WarGames!
I can tell you immediately the CP/M 2.2 System Alteration Guide is not online, just the 2.0 guide. What a haul!
recently I've been binging the channel "tech time traveler". fits right into this kinda stuff.
IMSAI directly from the movie War Games.. awesome find dude!
With the Televideo, and the IMSAI, you have the two most iconic machines out of Wargames
He's most of the way to building a replica of David's bedroom. xD
@@NozomuYume And have the Data General play WOPR to run the old dial-in software so it can run Global Thermonuclear War.
Actually, though they were never shown on-screen in the movie, all of the displays in the Wargames war room were being driven by CompuPro S-100 systems.
The Compupro 8/16 was known for having a tremendous amount of CPU options- 8085, Z80, 8088, 8086, 80286, 32016 and 68k were all available CPU options. It could even be equipped with more than one processor.
The 8080 was my favorite S100 system, and the best looking. I can see why it was used in the movie, War Games.
Ooh man, I am ridiculous hyped for these!
Hah, I was just thinking "Man, Shelby's getting into Usagi Electric territory here..." and there he is! Love your content!
I had to burst into laughter when you demonstrated the disk drive latching mechanism and an entire dust cloud seemed to puff out. Those are some dirty drives :D
CuriousMarc recently showed a scanner thats PERFECT for these manuals, check his recent videos. That scanner does soooooooo much to get perfect scans of old manuals
Yes! I can't wait to get mine. That's his 3rd video/model he tried that finally convinced me to get one.
@@jeremiefaucher-goulet3365 I've been looking at these for a while, but I heard that they were unreliable and no good for books that print close to the margins. I've seen people make some fairly simple ones with a DSLR and a bit of perspex, and I'm tempted to try building one.
@@kuro68000 Should be a really fun project 👍. Personally I don't need yet another project, I have so many already lol.
Not sure it will help though, for when the issue is the book itself, like you described.
The main attraction to me is the ease of use and speed. Just flip the page, click with the foot pedal. Boom. Rinse and repeat. It's long enough process already I don't want to spend hours in postproduction or manual adjustments for every page. Looks like getting under 2 seconds per page flip is doable with this one.
From curiousmarc's review, the software seems to have gotten really good with it's automatic features producing a good enough result without any manual intervention, eliminating the bookbinding curves and final searchable PDF reassembly with good OCR. And if it's good enough for Marc it will certainly be good enough for me. I trust him completely for the kind of everyday use he needs his for.
@@jeremiefaucher-goulet3365 yeah, I think I might splurge on one because it's just so easy and fast.
For OCR, if you have the TIFF output you can use Tesseract to make searchable PDF. It doesn't replace the text, it just overlays an invisible text layer so you can select and copy it, as well as search. It's fairly easy, I've done a couple of books that way.
@@kuro68000 Same thing. Marc demonstrated the OCR feature too. Yes, the image is what you see, but you can still select, copy and search the text in the document.
And again, having it integrated and automated in the workflow is the main attraction to me here. Speed of use and convenience is the feature that sells to me. It may not seem like much to you, but that's one less step I have to make, needing to use an external program to OCR the thing.
It took the latest model and recent software improvements, like auto-photoshopping-out the plastic fingers used to hold the book open, to finally convince me. I love it's added feature that it can now be used as projector and webcam as well.
Your a young guy and I started in this IT industry in my 2nd year of high school. I was at a Company call Datapoint(look it up they installed the first network in Las Vegas around 1978) with Apple during the Apple II, Apple IIe, Apple III, LISA, and the 1st MAC(I edited the book on the MAC) was at DEC(DIgital Equipment Corp) which was purchased by Compaq, and IBM.
I lived what your are looking at as history. I am/was a programmer, engineer, storage engineer, network engineer, software engineer, and application programmer. I did hardware and software.
I am now on my 2nd career working on guitars, banjos, ukuleles, and amp repair. Much less stress and no corp bull.
Have fun
Ricky from IBM, Ret
Woa... it seems like a monstrous task to preserve all these discs and documentation.
Im sure you are totally up for it, altho i hope you dont get burned out by it.
This man has a lot of self restraint. I quite literally wouldn't have enough will power in my entire psyche to not plug them both in and power them on immediately. (It doesn't help that I'm really bad at electronics in general and wouldn't know how to check anything except for bulgy caps.)
A lot of times you learn by fire, literally. The urge to "just give it a try" really goes away when you've let the magic smoke out of a vintage bit of gear more than once.
imsai 8080 i think of wargames a classic
Take it from a EE that has restored vintage guitar amps to arcade machines. Do not and I repeat do not bother with reforming capacitors. Most likely end up with a high ESR, if they're electrolytic they can start leaking electrolyte that can rein havoc on the PCB and other parts. When they totally die they short out in turn can harm everything else. By all means don't listen like a bunch of people attend to ignore these wise words and when it happens just hear in your mind "I told you so".
Absolutely this, also from an electronics nerd that restores everything from vintage guitar amps/studio gear and vintage computers/consoles to repairing modern machines of all manner. Reforming caps is not in any way appropriate for any of it and will absolutely end up leading to potential headache further down the line. It's not worth it for modern cheap throw away electronics and it's especially not worth it for vintage, rare, and very valuable electronics :)
Those are 8" drives!! Holy table tablets, Batman!😄
Tech time traveler would be able to help you out with identifying the s100 cards as I think they have a few systems that use them. Also if you want to know about the imsai 8080 the imsai guy would be able to help you out with resurrecting the system as they did the same and made a series on RUclips.
On the topic of the unbuilt cards they may not be the rarest or the most useful but are definitely cool and probably should be placed on a shelf with pride of place showing them off, definitely unbuilt.
2:27 always good to see my main display still making cameos, I see ya down there PS3 3D TV
CuriousMarc did a video recently on a scanner thing that can scan books with spines. It corrects by projecting a light pattern to detect the shape of the book.
When I was in college, I wanted an Imsai 8080 so bad!!! The 8080 processor could address 64K of RAM. Each memory card could hold 4K of RAM and cost about $1000 each if I remember correctly. So to fill it up, you'd need to buy 16 memory cards, which would fill up the whole cabinet (which could hold 20 cards) and leave no room for peripheral cards. I even had that exact same Imsai brochure that I treasured, thought mine is now lost to history and has probably turned to dust by now packed in some box in my attic.
Welcome to the IMSIA 8080 owners club! I've had my Imsia 8080 for a little over a year new and have been able to run CP/M and a good many pieces of software on it like Nevada FORTRAN, some games etc using my VT320 (Soon I have have my Teletype ready to go as well). Some of the software that you will uncover will be unreal and I can't wait to see what you will recover. Hell, once you do I'll probably use some on my machine. It does look like those cards are just shoved in there on the IMSIA 8080, as those would have to be 8K or 4K cards for all of those to be addressable. Plus those early static RAM cards would suck down a ton of power and make ALOT of heat. I have only a 32K and a 16K card on my 8080 for that reason. For the 8-Inch drives I use the FDADAP and a kryoflux to write / read software (however I do have a greaseweasle now). However the more interesting one for me is the Compupro and the SUPER RARE hard drives. The S100 x86 systems have always been interesting to me and they just seem so strange with the software they run and there is not alot out there about them. On the point of the hard drives... if you could get those working you would have the only S100 system with working hard disks that I know of. I don't even know whats more exiting, the Data General, or the Compupro with all of that software.
Such interesting gear. You’re doing great work documenting and presenting this Shelby!
Wow! What an unbelievable amount of great stuff!!!. I’m amazed by this things and I hope you will share a lot of the work you are going to do on them. Great video.
Wow this is great stuff Shelby. I think these computers will be a rabbit hole certainly worth delving into. These computers mark an interesting time in computer history. Looking forward to upcoming videos. Cheers!
Big congrats on the score. Wow, what a treasure trove of history. Best of luck on the refurb effort. Can't wait for the next vid.
This is great stuff! I can't wait to watch you get all these systems working.
What a gold mine! So glad you are dedicated to preservation of documentation as well. Great video.
Wicked awesome. That's a solid front panel on the IMSAI, glad to see you've got a spare if you need it. You're off to a great start!
Those liniar psu's, wow man 🤩! thanks for sharing all of this. really amazing to watch.
Just love your enthusiasm, you remind me of me 35 years ago. I enjoy the way you enpart knowledge. I'm 60 and have been fixing electronic equipment all of my working life, mostly Analogue & digital audio & video equipment but lots of computers & their peripherals too, I guess i'm a little jaded now but you have given me new energy. Thank you, and best of luck.
Wow, just wow! I had a Cromemco Z-80 S-100 bus system with a pair of 8" floppies. Cost almost as much as a new car! Played my first text-based Adventure game on it. You probably know this already, but many of the 8" drives were meant to spin all the time. There was no motor control. So I would load whatever I needed off a floppy, then pop the release open to unload it off the spindle to avoid excess wear, and that constant swishing sound. When I went to access something on the floppy again, often as not I forgot to close the latch again and got read errors as a reminder. Thanks for the blast of nostalgia!!
I do not know what I like more... the gorgeous tech or the gorgeous hair! :) Great work, very entertaining and informative. Thanks from Germany! :)
This is great! Looking forward the next video hopefully soon!
The idea of a combined 8085/8088 running MP/M sounds thrilling. Done right, this would allow up to 16 users each having both access to a 8080 compatible and a 8086 compatible environment with the later perhaps even having more than 64k of RAM available.
@4:30 the floppy system for the Australian computer Microbee (or at least the 128k system) used the same floppy drives. The MicroBee had some weird floppy format that made 360k disk hold 386k. Fun times!
I'm insanely jealous! Congrats on the stash!
It seems like the previous owner was using the machines to store all “good” cards. They must have had multiples that they condensed to only the working cards and then opted to store those in the chassis to keep them organized and protected.
Those are some very cool computer! Thanks for showing them. 🙂
Speechless. Thank you. You need to be archived, as well.
Wish I was closer, I would gladly help you clean and retro bright each item, one and a time..
This isn't like you won the lottery...it is more like you won ALL of the lotteries! Wow, Wow, Wow.
All that dirt brings back memories about living in Arizona for a number of years. I can almost smell it! 🙂
I can't wait for future videos. I'm picking up a huge compupro / S100 haul this weekend and I can't wait to go through everything. Maybe we can swap software, too.
God, these are amazing. I love this wild west era of computing.
Nice, you struck gold with those. They are pretty hard to come by and very expensive if you can find them. Congrats and great video !!
The colors of your channel logo always reminded me of the IMSAI 8080, so much so that I thought you already had one.
awesome stuff, can't wait to see them working
That's quite a collection. I only recently subscribed to your channel, and now I'm looking forward to watching the content associated with these dinosaurs.
You can always use warm slightly soapy water + warm rinse water process for most of the boards that are just chips, resistors (no pots), caps, diodes and transistors. Soak them in the warm water for a while, brush them with a soft tooth brush, then rinse them, then blow them off with compressed air.
S100 bus machines are pretty simple. Given the simplicity, it's pretty trivial to reverse engineer them. The great thing about those 70's machines is they're pretty simple to work on. Of course, if you go into high-end DG and DEC stuff, things get pretty complicated unless you're working on early stuff.
I got a RCA MS2000 system recently. Although it's incredibly rare, it's still just double-sided boards and pretty trivial to work on. Lucky, because it doesn't work, and parts are impossible to find
If you mean parts like transistors, it should be possible to source compatible equivalents.
@@kerryedavis Yeh, i sourced some parts to fix it, which were some common-and-garden 7400 series AND gates IIRC.
But replacement boards are non-existent
My God! I spent watching this video completely stunned, I had never seen anything like it, it's surprising.
Well I just have to say it. I"M JEALOUS !!!. Love to play around with electronics like this. Some people do crossword puzzles. I love to play with electronic puzzles.
I love the random Viewsonic manual in there :D
Wow, that looks like a lot of work! But hopefully you'll be rewarded with two working micros at the end. I'll definitely be following this project (projects?) with great interest!
Really interesting seeing this video right after getting our own S100 based system. I hope it all turns out well for us, since it is being shipped from Canada to California.
WRT cleaning-- just wash them with soap and water. As long as you dry them off completely before connecting them to power you should be fine. I worked for Tektronix in the 1970s as a repair tech and that's what all equipment went through when it arrived at the service center. We had a wash rack with pretty much the same soap & water nozzle that you see at the local self-serve car wash. Next to it were the dryers, which ran at something like 125-140 degrees F where we put the washed & rinsed equipment with the side panels removed. They stayed in the driers for a couple of days to insure they were completely dry. We never had an issue as the result of this process. There was one rule-- some of the equipment had large can style power transformers that if you oriented them wrong, could collect water to the point they might not dry out in a couple of days-- the rule was for anything that had such transformers you had to orient them in the driers such that the can opening was facing down to allow them to drain. The driers were basically a heated metal cabinet with some fans to keep the air flowing. But you could just let it sit long enough in a relatively warm environment, give it a week or so as likely you won't have your own drier. Or maybe some other makeshift setup would work, put it in an oven on low? Not sure if most ovens go low heat enough to be a good idea tho. Time will dry them off, and they'll be a lot cleaner that you'll get with a vac.
You should consult Adrian's Digital Basement and the 8 Bit Guy for how to clean these things up. These guys have covered this stuff for years.
You should try getting a lottery ticket! Wowzers so many cool stuff
Man I've been hounding ebay for S100 stuff the last couple months and I'd kill for one of those unbuilt kits. You defiantly found an awesome score of retro computer hardware. Can't wait to see the updates to this.
I cannot wait to see more vids of the Imsai in particular
I had an IMSAI 8080 that I bought as a kit in 1976. I built that system out with a teletype with paper tape reader puncher. Lear Siegler ADM3 a terminal and 2 8” drives. I ran CPM on it with Peachtree accounting software and eventually word star word processing. I remember the power supply was gigantic. You could probably weld with it.
All I have to say is DROOL. What an absolutely incredible haul. Congrats man, you deserve it. Thanks for sharing with us. Can't wait to see more on these systems. Just wow.
I sold my 8080 last year. $1700 with a Chromemco ADC/DAC board, a ram board, and Northstar floppy. Hadn't powered it on for many years. When I did, the caps on the ram board popped, so I replaced them, no problem.
I would take each piece of hardware outside, disassemble, and with an air compressor blow the dust out while using a soft anti static brush.
Creative speakers! Im still rocking one here
Wow, nice load of vintage coolness. I've been looking for a good example S100 system for a little while but I'm going to be picky what I get since my time is limited and I'm really not up for a complete restoration. These were solid systems for the age, and not that complicated overall, so you should have a good chance to get them both working!
Its pretty clear that the previous owner has just plugged in the cards to the bus to protect them, so I wouldn't power anything up until you have determined which cards are necessary. Its possible the compupro had all those cards though, given it seems to be configured as multiuser system and has an 8088 processor that could address all that memory.
I remember lusting after the IMSAI 8080 in a computer shop in Pasadena, CA. It was an odd chain of stores, run by turbaned Hindi.
So stoked. Forreal.
I would die laughing if the IMSAI has "Greetings Professor Falken" as the text on the startup screen...
I'm probably more excited for these videos than you are. YOU are doing all the work and I can just watch and marvel. How serendipitous you got these machines and will be preserving them. Thank you so much and it makes me proud to be a Patreon supporter of yours.
I don't envy the task you have ahead of you in cleaning all this. That's going to be a lot of work.
Thank you SO MUCH for preserving these disks and documentation! I real service to humanity! Thanks again, man! 🥰
I’ve not seen that sort of 5 1/4” drive in the US, but back when I was a kid in the UK, I had a single drive of that design connected to a BBC Model B.
CuriousMarc levels of vintage and scale!
Ah, the wet sound of eye rolls. 😂 I really enjoy your channel.
The IMSAI 8080 has two different sets of collectors after them.
Obviously, retro-computing collectors want them. They're functionally identical to the Altair 8800, but the switches are much easier on the fingers.
Movie prob collectors want them as well, because the home computer in the movie Wargames was an IMSAI 8080, which was already pretty much an antique when the movie was made.
This may sound crazy but back in the day (mid-seventies) when I got electronic components like the ones you have, after CAREFUL inspection watching for paper-based components I’d wash the cards in the dishwasher. No soap, just a good “pressure clean”. I’d then spray down the cards with distilled water to ensure I got the potential minerals from the city water. I never did that to S100-based computers but I did on later computers including some very grody Apples. Same goes for keyboards as long as the keys were sealed (not many back then). I DON’T suggest you just grab a bunch of boards and toss it in the dishwasher but when you find the amount of dirt and dust (and bug/mouse poop) , it’s really nice to go from yuck to new.
For the bound manuals you want to scan, I had a similar dilemma many years ago as well. I used a destructive method. With a belt sander and 120 grit belt, I’d sand off the binder spine then fed them into a company scanner designed for this sort of work. I felt bad having to do that but back then there were plenty of duplicates so semi-destroying one wasn’t an issue. A 3 hole punch and a big enough binder worked just fine.
Good luck!
Thanks for you intrduce this !
Am I the only one that misses floppy disks? They just bring me right back to my childhood. There’s really no modern removable storage that has the same sensory satisfaction as listening to an old floppy drive clunk away, as it loads your favorite game.
I completely agree. My Apple II+ is one of my favorite vintage computers, and part of the fun experience is handling and saving/loading from floppy disks. I don't think I'd ever even bother with floppy drive emulators. That would take away a bit from the experience in my opinion. And contrary to what a lot of people claim, I have NOT had any problems whatsoever with 5.25 disks. Even the "questionable" extremely old ones that were stuffed in a box when I bought the computer still formatted and worked completely fine. Lol I just cleaned them a bit and I never had any problems.
We used to use those big floppies to run our H-NMR at our old lab.
kirby vacuums are ESD safe I believe as well, as the motors have special slip rings to isolate the motor from causing static build up
Shelby, what a haul! I look forward to your video on the hardware & software used in your automatic capacitor reforming setup!
If "legal" (copyright-wise) now-a-days, will you image the MS FORTRAN software, possibly even scan the documentation, and make it available online? I took a WATFOR FORTRAN class in 1977 using punched cards and I think that would be fun to re-live using a version of FORTRAN almost as old! ;)
On your 8-inch "data" diskettes, I'm sure that you'll simply reformat them so you can reuse them for your own purposes. I know that by the mid-to-late '80s, some commercial software on 5-1/4-inch diskettes used not only software anti-copying protection, but also "hardware" protection at the same time, to defeat "flux" copying hardware like the Copy II PC boards (a predecessor to your KyroFlux unit, I think). They would "laser burn" a specific physical location on one or both sides of the media and have hidden checks in the software to find that/those spot(s). I was able to copy _some_ of that software back then, but it took two diskettes with the same copy of software, one with hand-scraped (hand-damaged) areas using an XACTO knife or similar to get past the "boot" process, then one to be swapped in so that the game could be run.
I also look forward to you making a "How I use the KyroFlux" card to rip diskettes. I don't know if my Copy II PC board is still functional and don't remember what its capabilities were as far as working with other than 5-1/4-inch diskettes, so I may be in the market for a KryoFlux (or similar) card, especially something that _might_ be able to work with 8-inch diskettes/drives.
If you decide that you want to _wash_ stuff in your office, think about a "parts cleaner" like sold at some auto parts outlets or even at some hardware stores. They are self-contained and you'd only need to remove the dirty liquid as required and haul it to a safe place for disposal.
Some document scanners include software to (~automatically) "unbend" the page scans from books to avoid the need to destroy the original document.
The 5.25" floppies are most likely Mitsubishi M4851 or another M485x in the series. I just happen to have two M4851s in REALLY good condition (may be NOS) that arrived today in the post. I will be using them with a CP/M machine I'm in the middle of restoring.
Your videos don't stop to surprise me, hope you get the stuff back up running. About the Capacitors, in the long tern they have to be replaced, reforming is not really something that works for longer just to get it running. You can't reverse the damage that is done to the Caps, I don't want to get into the details, but reforming is not really worth the time. If the die they die even with reforming, it might delay it by a year or so, but not more. But i think for you this is just to get them running and you will replace them later i guess, just wanted to put that out there
I can hazel a tine, @4:19 lol @ that dust plume shooting off that latch
*Turns on IMSAI 8080* Greetings Professor Falken, shall we play a game?
I dont know if you follow CuriousMarc on YT. In a recent video he showed a device to scan books, with software that that straightens out pages automatically.
That device might be interesting for you. The device is: "CZUR ET 24 Pro".
I just got my Imsai on Friday. I know that it’s going to take me a while to get it running because
the cpu card included was a Ithaca Audio Z80 that did not have the crystal.
This card can take a 18mhz crystal for 2mhz operation, or a 36mhz crystal for 4mhz operation.
I was only able to find a 18mhz crystal at the local surplus store, so there is a chance that the
timing is not going to correct. Replaced the heat sink as the builder messed up and cut up the old one trying to get it to fit.
I also removed the +12/-5 power for onboard 2708 EPROM as there’s a errata sheet for using a 2716 single voltage EPROM
on the CPU card.
Next I just replaced the case fan as it was a 220vac fan, with a 120vac fan. Checked transformer taps, was set for 115vac.
Today I removed all cards and front panel, and used a variac to slowly bring up the power supply.
Used my DMM and scope to check voltage and ripple, and everything looked great.
Be careful or you'll end up like the guy who collected all the stuff at Computer Reset. 😁
Tandy, Amiga, Commodore - they knew how to name computers in the 70s and 80s.
I came for the IMSAI, I got the IMSAI and Wayne Campell. EXCELLENT !
Sometimes you need to stop starting too many projects, and try to finish existing work. However with retro hardware you do need to grab things when you see them!
Adrian's digital basement did some work on those 8 inch drives including connecting them to a modern computer to transfer data in his Trs80 restoration series.
There is a scanner that is made specially for bound documents. It is aware that the pages are distorted so it automatically fixes the image to remove this distortion. This eliminates the need to disassemble the document to scan it. I'm sorry but I don't know its name but it does exist.
That hp psu is seriously cool
Those capacitors are huge!
Oh hey, I've got a 5.25" floppy with the same weird release mechanism. Mine were originally used with a Sinclair QL
Liking those white 8080s on the CPU cards in the IMSAI
0:06 Microcomputers of that era were small minicomputers. Thus the name _micro_ computers. Tandy, Apple, Commodores, etc changed that, but S-100 stayed popular with VARs that sold to small businesses.