exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

After a bit of head/wall impacting the SIP ATA device is talking to the Asterisk SIP PBX software and...

The One Per Desk is online!


The OPD connects to a local virtual extension which has a V23 virtual modem sitting on it. This calls out over telnet to telstar.com, which is an online Viewdata service.

Cool. Will you be able to make voice calls from it?

I visit Telstar now and again myself - when I fancy catching up on the news old style :D

A few years ago I knocked up a web client to a few viewdata/tex sites

https://vd-view.azurewebsites.net/

I can only make voice calls between the 8 ports on the ATA box. Not much use that. 🙂

stephen_usher wrote: 04 Dec 2023 23:18 I can only make voice calls between the 8 ports on the ATA box. Not much use that. 🙂

Shame. It would have been fun. You could have stored your phone book on it :D

"Hi, it's Stephen. I'm calling from my OPD"
"What's an OPD?"

It would've been great for stock trading back in the day

Looks like the French "Minitel", but bulkier...

HigashiJun wrote: 05 Dec 2023 00:08 Looks like the French "Minitel", but bulkier...

:-)

And does slightly more.

stephen_usher wrote: 05 Dec 2023 09:23 :-)

And does slightly more.

Hmm, interesting...

It has "built in" office applications, word processor, spreadsheet, database and office graphics, and can run a cut-down version of the Sinclair QL's SuperBASIC.

However, the way that ICL designed the memory map and the base memory of 128K really cripples the machine.

After the OS and base applications are running you're lucky if you have 50K left.

You can add 64K more memory, but that's in two 32K chunks.

The ROM and the ROM cartridge slots take up a lot of the address space but are not in nice contiguous blocks. Whoever thought the design up wasn't really thinking straight or thinking about an expandable product or one which could be developed further. It's not even cost reduction efforts, it's just silly.

Oh, and the OS allocates memory in 512 byte "blocks".

It almost sounds like it was a 1970s mini-computer designer who was asked to build the thing and based it upon a 1960s system. Should have had a paper tape reader. :-)

:lol:

At last the capacitors I ordered over a week ago are out for delivery. Not that I need them now.