Sometimes you collect vintage gear without even realizing that it’s vintage gear. Take this LED signboard for example:
Standard retail gear, right? Nothing exciting from a vintage computer guy’s perspective. But hey.. what’s this on the side?
A floppy drive?! And an AT style keyboard connector?! Hmmm… okay, now I’m really curious. Let’s unscrew the back panel and see what’s going on here.
Gadzook! Quite the array of electronics in here! But look over the to left.. is that…
It is! It’s a 386! This signboard is driven by a very scaled down 386 PC! So what’s the story?
In the early 1990s, a company called JVF was offering animated signboards for retail use. According to a gentleman in the know some years back, the deal was you paid $5000 for the sign, and then had to pay JVF a subscription fee on an ongoing basis, with additional fees to change the message on the sign. I was told that you never actually owned the sign – you were just paying for the rights to host and use it, and JVF could take it back. The sign was capable of some pretty fancy animation. Check out this video by one owner:
The sign was ‘booted’ up with an MSDOS disk that contained the drivers for the LED board as well as JVF’s custom software to produce messages. The software was entirely proprietary and the end user could not make any changes without going through JVF first.
Sadly, (or perhaps, understandably) the business model did not work. Sometime in the late 1990s JVF met its demise, leaving signboard owners stranded and unable to change the signboard messages. This was especially problematic if you were a retail outfit using the sign to display things like prices. Over time, the signs were retired and dropped. I got mine from a client – I was curious about the PC inside and thought perhaps someone might one day find a way to edit the sign contents.
Turned out I was right, a group of determined individuals came up with their own sign programming utilities. I actually got my hands on a copy thanks to a guy who went by the handle Mr. Henderson, and managed to edit and use the sign for my business for a while. The new tools didn’t quite enable you to do the kind of fancy animation JVF did, but it at least made the thing usable. As I recall, you had to install the software on a PC running Windows 95 or less. You would then edit the files in the ‘slideshow’ utility and save them to a 720K bootable disk. As I mentioned, the disk was a standard MSDOS disk that called up the slideshow program via an AUTOEXEC.BAT file.
This is mine booting up:
I’m not sure what the purpose of the keyboard port was since DOS does not drive the LED directly. However in the previous video I notice it appears there were some utilities you could use directly on the signboard.
I’d love to figure out how the driver works – I don’t know if it’s possible but it’d be cool to find a way to redirect text and graphics output from the 386 PC inside to the LED directly and actually use it as an oddware vintage PC. I’m imagining my days playing Kings Quest on my father’s IBM Convertible, but in this case, writ large!
I’m a pretty diehard collector, so one would expect I’d already have a key milestone in computing, the ‘portable’ Osborne 1, in my collection.
Nope.
There’s a variety of reasons – one being that I kept getting lured off to more interesting machines. The other being that, I just had a sneaking suspicion vintage computer prices were too high and bound for a correction. Especially on something like the Osborne 1 (O1), which a decade ago was fetching hundreds of dollars. The O1 is not a rare machine by any stretch. It was famously successful, with Osborne ultimately producing tens of thousands of units before they ran into trouble with the successor model, the Executive. My strategy, such that I had one, was to just wait.
While I waited, I learned that in fact, there were a couple of variants of O1. The first 10 machines produced as prototypes were sold with metal cases. They looked like this:
Linked photo: oldcomputers.net
The prototypes appeared in much of the advertising. But the actual production design used plastic for the cases. The first O1s looked more like this:
Linked photo: oldcomputers.net
Later in production, the decision was made to revise the case design to incorporate a sturdier plastic. These machines are distinguishable from the first O1s by changed ‘bezel’ around the floppy drives. The drives behind the bezel and the guts of the machine are still the same – just the casing is different. The keyboard also received a ‘gully’ above the keys. Not sure what the purpose was.. maybe to hold pens? Anyway, this revised model was officially designated the Osborne 1a.
Linked photo: oldcomputers.net
I had a several years’ think about it, and ultimately decided I wanted the original O1. I like the rougher look a bit better, and anyway, as a collector you tend to go as early as you can. I made no special effort to find one, prefering instead to wait until an opportunity presented itself. And sure enough it came up on ebay.
$99!! And a super low serial to boot – 337! Sure, the front bezel has been Swiss Cheesed by someone (rightly) concerned about heat dissipation. And okay, it doesn’t work. But when you are talking over 100,000 units produced, a number in the low hundreds is pretty unique. Plus the price was right! Who knows what I might find in there, this early in production? I know from experience with other makes and models that the earliest units sometimes have little differences from later, owing to tweaks during the production process. Anyway, I snapped it up.
When it arrived a couple weeks later, I naturally set to figuring out what was going on. From the description and pictures, I thought it was a simple case of bad RAM or similar. It seemed like it was being frozen at a garbage screen. However, that’s not quite what was going on. In fact, the machine behaved like it was possessed. Check it out yourself:
Taking apart the Osborne was a breeze – partly due to the fact that someone else already had and had not replaced about half the screws!
Anyway with the guts out, I tried the RAM piggybacking trick. You basically install a RAM chip of same type over an existing chip. If it’s bad, the good chip will complete the circuit correctly and the machine in theory will start working. If not, then that chip is likely working and you repeat with the next chip and so on until you find the culprit(s). Then you replace the bad chip(s). But no dice here. I even went full on and took a complete working set of 4116 RAMs from my Apple IIs and tried piggybacking the whole thing, but to no avail.
I then went into more rudimentary checks -I checked the voltages on the power supply, removed and checked the CPU in another machine (it was fine) and so forth. Nothing seemed to make any difference. I consulted photos and schematics, trying to decide where to hunt next. That’s when I discovered something odd: my O1’s motherboard didn’t look like the standard O1 board at all! Check it out. In the first pic is the standard O1 board. The second pic is mine.
The basic shape is the same, but everything is laid out differently! The external ports and brightness/contrast knobs are in their usual positions on mine, but the placement of the ICs – the CPU, floppy controller and such is totally differerent on my board! Same with the speaker and all the support logic. And check out that football field of nothingness on the far right side of my board! That’s a lot of unused space! The board in the topmost pic has just two EPROMs, mine has three! The date codes on most of the ICs, meanwhile, are almost all from 1980, a year before production got rolling. Only the EPROMs and one or two support chips are a little later.
I started digging around but every earlier O1 I found had the same motherboard as in the topmost photo. And I found machines considerably earlier than mine — down to serial number 55! — but they all seemed to have the same board as in the top photo. None had one like mine. Definitely it appeared that my board was an earlier revision than the others. I began to salivate as one word crossed my mind: prototype. You might wonder why a prototype board would appear in a machine several hundred units into production, but’s it’s not unheard of. Every dollar counts, and companies sometimes do strange or unusual things to move inventory. The Apple Lisa saga comes to mind – it’s believed a certain quantity of unsold Apple Lisa 1s were converted from 5.25″ Twiggy drives to 3.5″ Sony drives by Apple itself, and then sold as Lisa 2s. Some sold even still had their original Lisa 1 serial numbers intact. I have also seen examples of companies putting prototype or early-production components into current production machines, or even just putting a production serial number on a prototype/pilot run machine and selling it, just to clear them out. I was guessing that maybe my unit was a prototype/pilot machine that got issued a serial number and sold shortly after production started.
I decided to reach out to the O1’s designer on this one, Lee Felsenstein, via email. Lee emailed back said the board definitely appeared to be based on the prototype boards. The large empty space, he explained, would have been for linear voltage regulators installed on those units, which apparently had been revised out in mine. In particular, he found the handwritten revision number, in black marker at top left, to be interesting, as it wasn’t common practice to do that.
Lee couldn’t account for why this unusual and apparently very rare board ended up in SN 337, but his thoughts were close to mine – simply that someone, either by accident or intention, decided to install it. It could have been as simple as the board inadvertently being slipped in amongst the regular production boards at the factory. Or maybe on purpose, if someone in inventory wanted it gone. It could have been an early warranty replacement scenario and this prototype board just happened to be available as the replacement. Or maybe an employee owned this unit and built it this way themselves. It’s likely impossible to know for sure, although I will try to reach out to other Osborne people as Lee suggested and see if anyone recollects anything. All the same, it appears to be a one off situation. I’ve been researching madly since and still cannot find another unit that has one following this design. What a lucky break!
As a precaution, I had the EPROMs dumped and looked at by friends with much better skills at handling code than I am. One of the EPROMs is the standard character generator, same as all the other units. The BIOS version appears to be 1.3, which also was common on the earlier units. The only difference is mine has the BIOS split across two 2716 EPROMs, whereas in the main production board this is all on a single 2732.
In terms of operation, therefore, when (if?) the board is working, it should basically behave just like a regular O1. It’s quite possible it may have had an earlier BIOS installed previously – despite most ICs being from 1980, the two EPROMs both date to 1982. It seems to me like the board was built and used in some capacity before being configured to operate like the other production boards.
Unfortunately this rarity comes at a price – diagnosing why this machine won’t operate properly is going to be tricky since no schematic appears to be available for this board revision. I’ll keep plugging away at it.. but yeah… you learn something new every day, huh?
Working on various vintage reproduction projects, an irritant has been the look of the modern PCB stock we have available today. Modern PCB stock is made with a different process compared to decades ago and as a result both the color and texture are different enough to make it a dead giveaway that your reproduction is just that. Not that we should try to deceive – we do have a responsibility to ensure that future collectors are not fooled. But for my own purposes, especially for projects where the boards will be visible, that modern stock just ruins the whole aesthetic. Here’s what I’m talking about:
On the left is a new Mark-8 PCB produced using current PCB material. On the right is an original Mark-8 board fabbed using the old process. You can see there is a distinct difference in color – a kind of ‘fluorescence’ to the vintage board on the right. Further, when you get up close and look at the new board, the product is very smooth – vintage stock had a grain to it that was very apparent. No amount of dye or other tricks can correct this. Further, vintage PCB stock often has manufacturer ‘stamping’ on it that identifies where it was produced. My Mark-8 boards have NVF or Tc stamped all over them – indicating in the latter case that they were made by New Jersey fabhouse Techniques.
Unfortunately for years, the stuff on the left was the best I could do. Until two weeks ago, that is. I had been constantly searching ebay for ‘vintage PCB’ or ‘vintage copper clad’, the former yielding nothing and the latter yielding pots and pans. However, one day I decided to try searching via Google. I don’t know why but Google often finds things ebay itself can’t find. To my amazement, up came an auction for vintage PCB stock! And not just unknown vintage either! Actual dated stock from 1973!!!!!
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I know this seems like a trivial thing but to me this is huge. With actual 1973 board stock, I can make something that is virtually indistinguishable from the original! Naturally I ordered everything the guy had. Two weeks later, here it was:
Incredible! I mean, I’d expected to find something vintage-ish with enough searching. But actual new-in-bag with verifiable date of production? Crazy!! These boards have survived untouched since the days of President Nixon. They were around for the last days of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the fall of the Soviet Union.. wow! There can’t be too many of these still lying around out there, but I’m glad I kept the faith that there had to be at least some!
The boards are 0.03″ thick, rather than the usual 0.06″. But actually, that’s okay. Because they are single sided, if I wanted to make a Mark-8 board, which is double-sided, I can just make the two sides separately and then laminate them together. I’ve made boards from double sided 0.06″ stock.. it’s tricky.
I am currently working on building a SWTPC PPG joystick. I had already made one from the modern PCB stock – let’s see what it looks like with vintage! I almost feel kinda guilty opening these packages that have been untouched for four decades…
I used the usual toner transfer process to get my resist pattern onto the board. It went down pretty much the same as with modern – however, perhaps owing to the thinness of the substrate, the iron did manage to melt a sort of checkerboard pattern into part of it. Whoops! Anyway, next I cut it (easy, since it’s only 0.03″ thick!) and etch. Here are the results. First, we’ll compare it to my modern board stock:
Note: I etched a second piece of the vintage stock completely so I could sandwich it to the first piece, to give an idea of the color with the board at 0.06″ thickness. Above is the result, below is a TVT board I made using modern stock. Interestingly the scanner kind of distorts the color a bit, but you can still see a difference. In real life, the modern board is a more brown/yellow color and stands out pretty dramatically vs. the vintage board stock.
Here is a scan of the joystick board next to an original Mark-8 board:
Bit of a difference in darkness for sure. In person, the Mark-8 board doesn’t look that dark and in fact looks much closer to the NOS vintage stock. And it should, since they both were made by Techniques. Know how I know? Check it out:
That, my friends, is Techniques’ mark. Same marks that appear on my original Mark-8 boards! Different color — the ones on my Mark-8 boards are kind of red, but still.. very cool! I can make brand new Mark-8 boards that nonetheless have the old Tc stampings on them!!
Anyway, the lesson here is patience and persistence pay off. I knew it had to be out there and just kept looking, for years. There is probably more, maybe even some double-sided or 0.06″ thickness. It’s definitely out there! Now I’m in a pickle.. do I leave my TVT as it is or go the last mile and remake the boards from vintage stock? Hmmmm… 🙂
