rconn@BRL-MIS.ARPA (04/28/84)
From: Rick Conn <rconn@BRL-MIS.ARPA> I have one of the prototypes of the Ampro Bookshelf computer, which is based on the Little Board. I have never assembled the Little Board, since the Bookshelf comes A&T, but as to the Little Board itself, I am quite pleased with it. The recent demo on Z3 which I just ran was on the Bookshelf, and it worked very nicely. The Bookshelf consists of a Little Board, powersupply, on/off and reset switches, and 2 400K 5 1/4" drives (they are upgrading to 96 TPI, and I should be getting a Bookshelf with 2 800K 5 1/4" drives in two or three weeks). The Little Board design is quite clean and integrated. Zilog components used everywhere (Z80, CTC, SIO) with the floppy disk controller being a WD (I think) 1793. It has a true 64K of RAM, and the 2732 (4Kx8) EPROM maps out after boot. There is a system control port which controls the 2732 masking (I found this useful for the Remote Access system), and the SIO supports speeds (with the AMPRO clock) of up to 38.4K baud on Chan A and 9600 baud on Chan B. I think the clock speed is 4MHz. Joe Wright wrote the BIOS for the AMPRO, and, as those who tried the demo may have noted, it is really FAST! It rivals my Morrow 8" floppies in speed. Joe also wrote a disk drive configure program, and you can select from around 30 different disk formats to be supported on one of the disks. I have installed ZCPR3 on it, which is now being offered with it, and there are four different Z3 systems on it, the largest taking 3K of additional overhead and implementing an almost full ZCPR3 system (the AMPRO did not have enough I/O, I felt, to merit a full Z3 system) and the smallest taking no additional overhead (over CP/M) and implementing several of the nice ZCPR3 features, such as a shell stack and command line buffer and messages. I think the AMPRO is a good machine, and it performs as advertised. Rick