hbs@noscvax.UUCP (Harlan B. Sexton) (03/03/85)
We (some friends of mine and I, NOT the Naval Ocean Systems Center) have for sale one of the last (and only) available SYTE 3000 super-microcomputers. (SYTE went out of business without really getting into production, after purportedly using up $40,000,000 in venture capital.) We would prefer to sell the whole thing (box, terminal, etc.) as a unit, and will immediately accept an offer of $4,000. However, its only value is probably in its component parts, and so we will sell it to pieces, also. (Any ideas about where we might try to sell it would be greatly appreciated. Any replies may be sent to "hbs@nosc" or to "...!nosc!hbs") It should be noted that it IS NOT working at this time, although it did work pretty well for several months, and we think/hope that its illness would be rather easily fixed by someone who was knowledgeable. The machine is based on the National Semiconductor 32016 chip, and the CPU board has the 32016 CPU, MMU, and FPU. There is also an Intel 80186 chip and 2 8085 chips. The machine sports 1 Meg of memory in stylish 64K RAM's, and there are other random chips in the box, most of which appeared to serve some purpose. The machine also boasts a Micropolis 52 Meg Winchester Drive with (we believe) a 30 millisecond access time, a Wang Tek (or Wang-Tek???) 45 Meg streaming 1/4 inch tape drive (for which we have a number of cunningly designed tape cartridges), and ??? an ST 506 interface. (I have essentially no knowledge of hardware, being a mathematician turned computer scientist, and so I don't know if an ST 506 is an interface board, a protocol, or what. I am informed that all of this hardware so far described is standard.) Among other pieces of information we were given about our machine which we don't understand are that it (uses, has?) Quick 02 and/or 04 interfaces, has a DTC-540 disk controller, and (has, uses?) SASI and/or SCSI (boards, protocols?). The box has all the usual stuff, such as a power-supply (which seems rather large for this machine; we were supposed to be able to, eventually, run more than 1 cpu board in this box and a use more memory, a bigger disk, and I think several terminals and printers). There are also a terminal, keyboard, optical mouse and mouse-pad. The "tube" was made by VMI (Video Monitors, Inc.) and has a large black and white graphics screen, with a horizontal scan rate of 52.5 Khz, and a vertical scan rate of 60 hz. The tube has 800 visible scan lines out of 875 total. (I don't know what this means, either.) The keyboard is custom-made (remember, 40 Megabucks) which is non-ascii, gives out "up-down" codes (that is, signals when the key is pressed down and again when released), and it is multi-plexed with the mouse. --Harlan