I bought the lovely SOL-20 system yesterday. Picture: https://twitter.com/nf6x/status/790631315695513600
It will probably be a week or three before I work with it in detail, because right now I'm nominally working on my absurd Retrochallenge 2016/10 project of making a USB interface for an RL02 drive. Now I'm on the lookout for a small, monochrome, composite monitor of late 1970s vintage to set on top of it. I have other monitors which will be functionally just fine, but which won't look Just Right sitting on top of the SOL-20. I'll probably do initial work with my little Apple IIc monitor, just because it's small and easy to carry. This system came with an 80x25 video card, but I plan to initially use it in its original 64x16 glory. I'll either upgrade to 80x25 later in the natural progression of getting to know the new system, or use it in the other S-100 chassis that I am building up. I don't know about the system's operational status yet. I'm going in to the project assuming that the capacitive keyboard is dead, the electrolytic caps are dried up, the drive heads are filthy, and the bearings are gummed up. Maybe the condition is a lot better than that, but those seem like reasonable assumptions for a computer of its age that hasn't been used recently. -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <n...@nf6x.net> http://www.nf6x.net/
