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These are all SWP (South-Western Products, not to be confused with SWTPC) RAMDISK / 8088 MS-DOS adapter boards. Designed for various CP/M machines of the day, these commonly found their way into Kaypro machines, with Zorba machines being a distant second of sorts.

These are designed to sit on top of the drive stack, plug into the CPU port (the Z80 was pulled and placed on an adapter board) and some special software twiddling gave you a 256k - 1MB RAMDISK (depending on the model) or a MS-DOS mostly-compatible machine that used the host as a terminal.

These were purchased in 2013 and had some of the "missing link" software with them which has now been entered into various archives. The boards themselves are of unknown status, but are being kept around as spares for my working unit. The boards themselves date to the 1984/5 time period.

These are all SWP (South-Western Products, not to be confused with SWTPC) RAMDISK / 8088 MS-DOS adapter boards. Designed for various CP/M machines of the day, these commonly found their way into Kaypro machines, with Zorba machines being a distant second of sorts. These are designed to sit on top of the drive stack, plug into the CPU port (the Z80 was pulled and placed on an adapter board) and some special software twiddling gave you a 256k - 1MB RAMDISK (depending on the model) or a MS-DOS mostly-compatible machine that used the host as a terminal. These were purchased in 2013 and had some of the "missing link" software with them which has now been entered into various archives. The boards themselves are of unknown status, but are being kept around as spares for my working unit. The boards themselves date to the 1984/5 time period.

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[–] • 1 pt

Yeah, PCBWay has completely re-written the laws about prototypes.

Even for stupid shit like dumb power distribution boards - draw it up and you have it in hand next week.

[–] [deleted] • 1 pt (edited )

And you don't even have to torrent a cracked version Proteus/Ares anymore... Altium Circuitmaker is free and the latest free version is pretty close to regular Altium now.

Still use my old Proteus for simulations though... still don't have anything that beats it in that respect.

Edit: Have to say I'm using the Proteus simulations less and less these days, because it's library of MCU's is pretty old now. And then the MCU models it does have, have quirks.

[–] • 1 pt

I'm still using the National Instruments stuff from my last job. I grew accustomed to it's quirks, but very few seem to use it in the real world.

[–] [deleted] • 1 pt

NI LabView is pretty sweet. Long chains of fuckery sometimes, but I can definitely crank out industrial software with it way quicker than with say C# and VS.