exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

:swave:
Welcome to the forum!

I was at UMIST between 84 & 88 & they had lots of 1040 STs with mono monitors used in the labs and they had their own OS in there, connected to VME boxes IIRC.

Still got my original 1040 STF from that era...happy days!

Anyway, glad to have you on the forum.

:welcomewave:

Another Memotech owner...or at least you were. Which disk system did you have SDX or FDX? The FDX was so stylish. :-)

Thank you all for a great welcome to the board. I'm not great at forum stuff, so I'll answer the specific questions in new replies!

Steve wrote: 25 Oct 2021 16:49

bigbloke wrote: 25 Oct 2021 14:27 It was supposed to run a Unix-lite OS developed at the uni run from ROM, but we hacked it and ran it from floppy, so we could still use our STs for their real purpose of playing games (or MIDI if you had any musical bones!).

Hi and welcome, I'm always interested in Unix-like OS's for Atari. I never heard of a ROM version. Do you happen to have the ROMs still or floppies? If not do you have any contacts who might be able to image them for preservation? Thanks, Steve.

ps - great to have another electronic engineer, indeed a professional on the forum!

Hi Steve,

Unfortunately I have nothing from my first term of ST ownership. I can't even remember how I came to not have the Atari any more - lost in the mists/mystery of time. As JezC commented it was a UMIST special, it was pretty basic just a VTxx terminal front end running a basic local unix, or networked up to "servers". I can't for the life of me remember how the machines were networked in the lab. Probably RS232 or a MIDI based lash up.

As for professional electronics engineer - I'm a bit rusty on old architectures having mostly been a manager these last few years, but I like to keep my eye in. I was working on an 2GHz 4 core ARM system recently, so messing about at 8/16MHz should bring back some old memories!

Cheers, Paul

JezC wrote: 25 Oct 2021 17:27 :swave:
Welcome to the forum!

I was at UMIST between 84 & 88 & they had lots of 1040 STs with mono monitors used in the labs and they had their own OS in there, connected to VME boxes IIRC.

Still got my original 1040 STF from that era...happy days!

Anyway, glad to have you on the forum.

Hi JezC,

I probably bumped into you during that time! I was at UMIST on the MicroElectronic Systems Engineering course from 86-90. I wish I had kept my heavily upgraded machine from back then. Still it did lead onto a career designing VME boards with 68K family CPUs and some advanced (for the time) DSP architectures. Happy memories indeed!

Cheers, Paul

stephen_usher wrote: 25 Oct 2021 18:11 :welcomewave:

Another Memotech owner...or at least you were. Which disk system did you have SDX or FDX? The FDX was so stylish. :-)

Hi Stephen,

My Memotech came via a family member (remote cousin stuff!) working at Memotech back in the big 1983/4 rollout of the Memotech MTX family. I wrote a couple of published programs on that platform and used the money to buy the (huge!) FDX box with 80 column card and a single 5.25 floppy drive to run CPM. I think I got it at a discount (beyond the family members discount) as it was around the time Memotech was collapsing :(

I loved that machine - it was an engineers computer: well built with all the right software built in (even an assembler/disassembler) for a geeky user. I had to sell it to fund my 520STFM purchase for Uni. Now seeing what they go for on eBay I wish I'd held onto that too!

Cheers,
Paul

bigbloke wrote: 26 Oct 2021 16:49 Hi JezC,

I probably bumped into you during that time! I was at UMIST on the MicroElectronic Systems Engineering course from 86-90. I wish I had kept my heavily upgraded machine from back then. Still it did lead onto a career designing VME boards with 68K family CPUs and some advanced (for the time) DSP architectures. Happy memories indeed!

Cheers, Paul

Most likely, I was on that same course, just in the first batch of "victims" to take it. I even remember when we got our own room just for our course, probably about when you started :D

Yes, that course (and my project to interface a Transputer to the VME bus) made me desperate to buy a Falcon in the early 90s...

Cheers mate.

bigbloke wrote: 26 Oct 2021 16:58

stephen_usher wrote: 25 Oct 2021 18:11 :welcomewave:

Another Memotech owner...or at least you were. Which disk system did you have SDX or FDX? The FDX was so stylish. :-)

Hi Stephen,

My Memotech came via a family member (remote cousin stuff!) working at Memotech back in the big 1983/4 rollout of the Memotech MTX family. I wrote a couple of published programs on that platform and used the money to buy the (huge!) FDX box with 80 column card and a single 5.25 floppy drive to run CPM. I think I got it at a discount (beyond the family members discount) as it was around the time Memotech was collapsing :(

I loved that machine - it was an engineers computer: well built with all the right software built in (even an assembler/disassembler) for a geeky user. I had to sell it to fund my 520STFM purchase for Uni. Now seeing what they go for on eBay I wish I'd held onto that too!

Cheers,
Paul

You should pop over to the MTX forum (http://memorum.mtxworld.dk/) where some of the original staff and game programmers hang out. It doesn't matter if you no-longer have a machine.