Greetings!

Introduce yourself and reminisce
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glitch
Posts: 176
Joined: Mon Nov 28, 2011 12:43 am

Greetings!

Post by glitch »

Hello everyone! I'm a long-time forum lurker, but was only recently made aware that registration was open again. I'm also registered as glitch on the vintage-computer.com forums, so if you've ran into me there, yes, it's the same person!

I was introduced to OSI systems by one of my employers...he and his business partner got into OSI computers as part of their business -- designing and building mastering equalizers. They both bought OSI Challenger IIIs and ran mostly OS-65D and OS-65U, although it seems there was some CP/M dabbling, mostly for running Microsoft Fortran. One of the systems was a mostly off-the-shelf Challenger III OEM kit, while the other system was basically a huge Lambda 5-volt linear supply, a backplane and system boards. The second system, in addition to dual 8" floppies, also sported a Shugart SA-1000 hard disk running OS-65U and OSI's database.

Anyhow, I ended up with both systems, the system software and the manuals. I've been working on getting one of the systems up and going, and have a pretty stable Challenger III with triple-processor 510 CPU board, 48K of static RAM in 520 boards, 8K populated on an additional 520 board (for CP/M), and a 470 floppy controller board. Both of the original 8" drives were toast (bearings frozen, sensors/switches dead, et c.) and have been replaced with Shugart SA-800 drives. It boots OS-65D and OS-65U, and tries to boot CP/M but fails due to bad media.

Short-term plans for the system are to build a high-density static RAM board, providing 48K + 8K for CP/M using modern SRAMs. After that, I'm going to begin creation of a bare-metal bootstrap system for OSI systems (pushing machine code over the console through monitor commands, a la ADTPro) as well as a disk imaging system for 8" floppies that supports reading /and/ writing!
Check out The Glitch Works
OSI Challenger 3, 510 CPU, 8" floppies, 23 MB hard disk system starting to work!
Parts bin Challenger 3 board set, never had a chassis in its time
dave
Site Admin
Posts: 710
Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2008 5:24 am

Re: Greetings!

Post by dave »

Hi Glitch!

Sounds like a lot of fun. I have had very little exposure to the C3 series, so I'm interested to hear about your progress.

Your planned projects sound like they will be very welcome tools to OSI'ers, as there's a lot of bare metal out there!

Keep us posted.

Dave
nama
Posts: 357
Joined: Wed Mar 30, 2011 9:44 am
Location: New Zealand
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Re: Greetings!

Post by nama »

Hi glitch,
Fancy meeting you here.

Phil

2P (1mhz 32k) - 502 + 8k + CEGMON + garbage collector fix BASIC, D&N MEM-CM9 + 24k, 540 (mono) [SOLD]
4PMF (2mhz 24k) - 505, 540, 527, D13 + 5.25" + Gotek
Superboard RevD - CEGMON + 610 board 24k + D13
Spares - 3 x 527, 1 x 505, Backplane
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