OK, so Peter say’s ‘Yes’, so here we go……
On a Planet far far away – Oh wait I can’t use that here.
I have been interested in old computers for quite some time and I spotted someone on e-bay selling a ferrite core memory board, it looked interesting and I was intrigued enough to want to know how this technology worked, so I bid and won it.
When I tried to find more info on the board I contacted the seller who said he had more other boards for the computer which turned out to be a GEC 4070 mini.
Long story made short I bought all the rest of the boards from the seller, so I had a complete set of computer boards. The system that the boards came from was part of the chain that ran Prestel – excellent.
Next thing was to try to put together a Bus board to connect everything together. Now by chance one of the people I contacted still had a 4070 and was kind enough to photographed his system’s bus board (both sides and in detail) and also told me which boards needed to go where which I was very grateful for. It then became obvious that this was not a straight through bus board.
It was after all this and many e-mails I was contacted by Bob Mannix at RAL in Oxfordshire who basically said that their last working GEC 4070 had been scrapped and was going to be skipped as junk, so would I like it – Hell YES !!
So I arranged transport to Oxfordshire (I don’t drive) and picked up the Processor and memory box, which turned out to be a Silicon Ram version (about £12000 at the time !).
All of the documentation for the computers had already been skipped and all the cables connecting anything up had been cut at the box entry, so that wasn’t helpful, but what the hell.
My idea was to get the basic system going and then swap out the Silicon for Ferrite memory and see if the original data was still on the boards – hopefully an OS and some of the programs could be saved and used later on.
So my current computer was running the monitoring system at RAL’s Accelerator plant (along with a few others) and had been running for approx. 30 years, 24/7 and had finalyl been replaced by a couple of 486 desktops. All of my spare boards and Ferrite memory boards came from a Prestel system GEC and hopefully at some point in time run an OS again.
For those of you who don’t know Ferrite memory data is not lost on power down and can be retained for many, many years fully intact and on power on will run as though never turned off. There are stories of GEC’s being re-started and users losing connection for a short while and then continuing work as though nothing had ever happened as everything came back on exactly as it was left.
So there you have it.
Those of you who have fallen asleep at the back – fair enough, I can understand that.
Hope that is of some interest.
Alan.
On a Planet far far away – Oh wait I can’t use that here.
I have been interested in old computers for quite some time and I spotted someone on e-bay selling a ferrite core memory board, it looked interesting and I was intrigued enough to want to know how this technology worked, so I bid and won it.
When I tried to find more info on the board I contacted the seller who said he had more other boards for the computer which turned out to be a GEC 4070 mini.
Long story made short I bought all the rest of the boards from the seller, so I had a complete set of computer boards. The system that the boards came from was part of the chain that ran Prestel – excellent.
Next thing was to try to put together a Bus board to connect everything together. Now by chance one of the people I contacted still had a 4070 and was kind enough to photographed his system’s bus board (both sides and in detail) and also told me which boards needed to go where which I was very grateful for. It then became obvious that this was not a straight through bus board.
It was after all this and many e-mails I was contacted by Bob Mannix at RAL in Oxfordshire who basically said that their last working GEC 4070 had been scrapped and was going to be skipped as junk, so would I like it – Hell YES !!
So I arranged transport to Oxfordshire (I don’t drive) and picked up the Processor and memory box, which turned out to be a Silicon Ram version (about £12000 at the time !).
All of the documentation for the computers had already been skipped and all the cables connecting anything up had been cut at the box entry, so that wasn’t helpful, but what the hell.
My idea was to get the basic system going and then swap out the Silicon for Ferrite memory and see if the original data was still on the boards – hopefully an OS and some of the programs could be saved and used later on.
So my current computer was running the monitoring system at RAL’s Accelerator plant (along with a few others) and had been running for approx. 30 years, 24/7 and had finalyl been replaced by a couple of 486 desktops. All of my spare boards and Ferrite memory boards came from a Prestel system GEC and hopefully at some point in time run an OS again.
For those of you who don’t know Ferrite memory data is not lost on power down and can be retained for many, many years fully intact and on power on will run as though never turned off. There are stories of GEC’s being re-started and users losing connection for a short while and then continuing work as though nothing had ever happened as everything came back on exactly as it was left.
So there you have it.
Those of you who have fallen asleep at the back – fair enough, I can understand that.
Hope that is of some interest.
Alan.
