Opinion – how not to take out Isis

Trying to take out Isis by bombing them from a few high flying aircraft is like trying to destroy a fire ant colony by stomping on it’s nest.

This approach has only really succeeded once – and that was when we resorted to using nuclear weapons at the end of World War II.

There is an old saying that might lead to an alternative approach that might have more promise – Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

SCELBI 8B Progress

Memory Expansion Board is almost done – I’m short one 7442, which will prevent me from checking out the last slot, but otherwise it’s ready to go. This board went pretty quick, the 67 resistors took as long as anything else on this board.

Memory Expansion Board

Memory Expansion Board

For now, I’m hacking together a wooden chassis with sheet metal front and rear panels. Once I get the aluminum version figured out, It will be easy to move the backplane and front panel switches from this hack job to the final chassis.

Temporary Wood Chassis

Temporary Wood Chassis

As far as the possibility of the short on the 4K SRAM board, though it’s pretty remote, I decided to add some masking tape to the bottom of one end of the fuse holder to eliminate it entirely.

Fuse Holder Masking Tape

Fuse Holder Masking Tape

Given where I’m at at this moment, I expect I’ll be able to power up the 8B with 4K of SRAM within a week.

Nat Wadsworth: How did biology get into the name: SCELBI

I learned this last year and figure I should share it before I forgot or worse.

At VCF southeast in 2013, I briefly met with Nat Wadsworth’s sister in law. She told us how Nat kept birds in his basement and developed the SCELBI on the second floor of his house.

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.2169047,-73.0073396,3a,90y,288h,90t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sUm1aprSPCyd5yaSyYp0ckw!2e0!6m1!1e1

She told us that Nat was studying bird diseases which accounts for the biology part of the SCELBI name.

8B backplane and 4K SRAM Soldered

8B backplane and 4K sram

8B backplane and 4K sram

I found a small issue in the layout of the 4K SRAM card. The trace leading from the ground past the fuse holders passes too close to the fuse holder for comfort. Since there is no solder mask on these boards, it would be best to mask this trace at this point with tape or something so it can’t inadvertently touch the fuse holder and short +5 to ground. Reviewing my layout, it looks like I missed aligning this trace correctly to the original layout. The layout in this area was obscured by the 10uF capacitor, and I didn’t notice the difference when comparing my layout to the original.

Ground Fuse Holder Issue

Ground Fuse Holder Issue

Next board to solder is the memory expansion board. It it will be fun putting in the 67 resistors that populate that board. Then I’ll have to cobble together a chassis for testing.

Apple 1 Registy updated and new SCELBI registry

I just posted an update to the Apple 1 registry. One system was deleted and one added, so the total count holds at 63. The new one is John Anderson’s, which will be sold at auction, next month. I just was contacted by the owner of what is probably an unlisted system, so the count could grow to 64, very soon. Christopher’s system, which has been shown at K’Fest, VCF midwest and VCF east has been undergoing some restoration, so I added an updated image and additional information.

Note that the success of the Apple 1 registry is largely due to contributions of owners and former owners and other interested parties and I greatly appreciate all new information.

What’s really exiting to me is the new SCELBI registry. If you think Apple 1’s are rare, I could only find information on 13 SCELBIs. I recently received information on what could be a 14th, but it also possibly could be the missing Freeman Museum unit. The images on the SCELBI registry will be a little different than the Apple 1 registry, as the images will emphasize the quirks and differences between the units. Many original SCELBIs don’t exactly look like factory stock systems, so Iit should be a good resource for people building reproductions.

I expect that some of the information may be incorrect. Bear with me as I expect to refine this registry quite a bit in the future.

New SCELBI 8B PCBs

SCELBI 8b PCBs

SCELBI 8b PCBs

The SCELBI 8B backplane, SRAM and memory expansion boards just arrived. They may take a couple of weeks or so to check out. If they work, I’ll be able to get floating point SCELBAL up and running on an 8B for the first time in a very long time, and so will you. There is a semi-reproduction that has run SCELBAL, so maybe not the first, but it all depends upon how you classify that system. To start with, I’m building a minimal, barebones, chassis mainly to allow check out of the SRAM and get SCELBAL running.

You will notice that there is a stack of cards involved. The big question is whether I finally screw up a layout and have to ditch one of these batches of cards. To date, I’ve never made a small prototype run of a few boards to check my work. There were prototype’s made of a few of my smaller cards, but they were either made on prototyping boards or etched here at home, where the cost is almost nil, compared to professionally made PCBs. The benefit of this rather risky approach is that I save a great amount of money by not making what would be rather expensive prototypes. This directly translates into a lower cost project for you and me. In addition to the risk of making a complete batch of dud cards, another downside is the great amount of time spent reviewing the layout before I eventually pull the trigger.

at last – PCBs for SRAM only SCELBI 8B are now on order

Some people have been asking for these for a couple of years – well I hope the wait will be worth it for those people.

I have also started serious work on the PROM card. Turns out that I will probably end up going over and tweaking the entire design that I started with, so it will take a little while. Not as long as doing the 3 other boards, but those that are interested will have to wait a little while longer for the PROM boards.

I’ll have the PCBs in a week or two, but I also need to order a few parts so that I can build them up and do some sanity testing.