It took a long time to get to me, courtesy of Canada Customs, which just had to get their few bucks on a 40 year old computer.  I was pleasantly surprised to see only one casualty upon opening the box — the case fan shroud.  It had broken in transit and the fan was just lying on the case bottom.  Digging around in the box I found all the pieces to reassemble it and tucked those away.

The case is impressive.  Solid aluminum sheet, and I mean solid.  Like, stop bullets solid.

No lid either. This particular case was called the ‘Basic Box’.  It was offered by DG for hobbyists who didn’t want to shell out for the ‘Cadillac’ options – the fancier case, keyboard and so on with DG badges, but who did want something nicer than a plywood slab to mount their computer into.  The Basic Box appeared in Flyer #10(thanks to Bryan of byte-collector for scanning and making these available!):

An interesting feature of 70s hobbyist computers — they often have full on AC plug ins at the back.  Thinking about our babyproofed world here in 2016 — it’s amazing an open case with live AC outlets was considered safe!

The card cage is really neat.  It’s on a hinge that allows it to swing out to the left, so you can access the bottom.  The motherboard on DG systems does not make connections between slots via traces, they are made via wires the user installs!

 

Swinging the cards out, the thing that makes a hobbyist PC really special becomes very apparent — all those little handwritten ‘notes to self’.

And check out this keyboard?  It’s obviously stolen from something teletypish.  It and has this neat little row of LEDs poking through perfboard that I think correspond to the ASCII codes it generates when pressing keys.

Now, here’s the thing I never get with my machines.. software!

And to my surprise, there is a lot more than what was pictured in the auction.  Not just the OS and a few BASIC tapes but also Maxi BASIC, an Assembler and a bunch of game tapes.  Yay!

Okay so…. do I fire it up?  Many serious hobbyists would shrink from firing up an unknown quantity like this on 40 year old power supplies.  I knew from the auction this unit didn’t work, but all the same, you never know what else you could make worse if said power supplies go nuclear or things are accidentally shorted or broken.

My attitude however: ah, screw it.  Let’s see what happens.  Here we go:

Woohoo!  I know, doesn’t look like much, but from reading this screen of cursors is a good thing.  It means the ‘TV/Cassette’ video board (apparently a 64 character unit) is alive!   Of course, this screen also means the CPU board isn’t doing anything yet.  Some further reading reveals why:  a typical DG system requires 3 boards to operate: CPU, I/O and TV/Cassette board.  Looking inside, it appears I have a CPU card, the TV card and three large RAM boards.  The I/O board is nowhere to be seen!  I triple check the box, but no dice.  And these are fairly big cards — kind of hard to lose.  There is one on Ebay (for $123.00), but I decide to look back at the auction to see if something went astray.  Sure enough, there is a picture of the card there – separate of the computer.  I contact the seller and after a couple of days they acknowledge – indeed, a card is missing.  They apologize for the error and ship it out.  We will have to wait before we can do any more diagnosing on this old girl.  Shucks! 🙂