osiweb.org

I'm Peter Hewett, although my friends call me 'Sig'. I'm an Australian expat living in the US.
My first time in the US was in 1977 when my Father was sent over by the R.A.A.F. (Australian Air Force) as an electronics engineer. We stayed until 1980, and while over here he bought a Superboard II. It was my first computer, and at 11yrs old, I took to it pretty quickly. We took it back to Australia with us and continued to use it until around 1984. Surprisingly, considering my Fathers profession and great interest in hobby electronics, the only expansion we made to it was populating it to 8k, and I was the only person who really used it. By the time I'd progressed to teaching myself assembly the C64 had come out and I spent my time mowing lawns and cleaning pools to buy one.
Recently I've been looking back at programming the old systems I used to own, and thought back on some of the things I wanted to do on the SBII but kind of 'ran out of time' an moved on from. So I've been collecting documentation and a couple of emulators - I doubt I'll be able to get actual hardware to use again, although I'm interested in some of the kits that have come out (the L-Star and Superboard III) and might look into them at some point.

Hi Peter,

Nice to see you on here.
I'm an expat "Pom" living in Sydney

A Superboard II was my first computer too. I painted houses and did all manner of odd jobs in the school holidays to be able to save up for one.

Real hardware pops up from time to time on Ebay, but the OSI stuff tends to command a high premium, even for equipment in poor condition: https://www.ebay.com/itm/282852042176

Superboard III will probably be near impossible to locate as well, since Vince Briel appears to have shut up shop, or changed direction.

FPGA emulation is another possibility:
http://www.osiweb.org/osiforum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=343
(When I get some more free time to work on it that is....)

Cheers,
Leslie

Yes it's a shame about Vince Briel and the Superboard III. I was really hopping to get one of those but waited too long. I wonder if we could get Vince to release the design as open source to us?

David

I was lucky enough to have one of Vince's Superboard III - it was very nicely done. His Kim board and terminal were also very nice.

This hobby has a serious problem with folks disappearing and keeping their work private. Several projects by Briel, Obtronix, and the IMSAI/Altair clones come to mind.

Dave and Jonathan's efforts to release the OSI boards has been fantastic. I'm also working with Jonathan on some IMSAI and Altair CPU boards that should be available shortly. Once the cost of the run is covered I hope to place the resulting Gerbers in the public domain.

- Gary

djones60 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 12, 2018 1:58 pm Yes it's a shame about Vince Briel and the Superboard III. I was really hopping to get one of those but waited too long. I wonder if we could get Vince to release the design as open source to us?

David

djones60 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 12, 2018 1:58 pm Yes it's a shame about Vince Briel and the Superboard III. I was really hopping to get one of those but waited too long. I wonder if we could get Vince to release the design as open source to us?
David

All may not be lost.

I noticed that ReactiveMicro are now stocking Vince's "Replica 1":
https://www.reactivemicro.com/product-c ... computers/
https://www.reactivemicro.com/2018/03/0 ... tore-item/

"We also working on releasing other Briel Computer projects in the future."

Perhaps that may include the Superboard III ??

Cheers,
Leslie

I sure hope so. I've love to do a Superboard III. But in the meantime I did a L-Star and loaded the OSI Superboard software on it.

https://www.l-star.org/