Curator // Destroyer

So, a lot has happened since my last post (ah the perks of working part time), when I left off all the cards where out of the system and I had just finished sorting out the damaged power supply. One of my cards had a dead short on it between the -16v rail and ground but aside from that everything was pretty much unknown to me.  The first order of business, before I even thought about applying power to any of the cards (although the seller had already done that helpfully, grrr) was to backup any irreplaceable information. First port of call was the 2758 in the CRT controller. The 2758 is an interesting mongrel chip, being one of the first, if not the first single supply EPROM. It's effectively a 2708 that only needs 5v. If you want to read a little more about it, I enjoyed this article. Now my particular one was presumably being used for character generation, or perhaps setting up the CRT5027. As my crt controller is so rare I was keen to get this backed up, as a 5v EPROM the proc...

  So recently I managed to acquire myself an S-100 system for relatively cheap (but still fairly pricey to me). Now I've wanted an S-100 system for a very long time, but due to their cost and most of them being located in America, I considered this a pipe dream. So of course when one became available to me I snapped it right up without any consideration, consider it an early christmas present.  So what did I acquire? A Tei Processor Terminal (either 208 or 408, the jury is still out) all the way from Houston in Texas, how did it get across the pond? Who knows! It has been converted to run on 220v and seems to work fine on 240v so there must have been someone importing these.  If you search for information on this computer you'll probably find that image being used, and for good reason, it's one of very few that exist. It turns out Tei, although seemingly fairly well regarded in the industry at the time, is relatively obscure today. Although they talked about being founded...