Hi: In the mid '80s I was involved in a project that required processing weather satellite radar data - a.k.a. DIFAX - and I designed and built the prototype board that interfaced to the satellite receiver. It used a pair of Motorola VME boards containing a total of 3MB of DRAM, an MC68020 processor at 12.5 MHz and an MC68881 floating point processor. The development work was written in assembler on an HP workstation. The production board was also my design and was a single board system that was used in HP 300 systems, in every weather centre in Canada. For two years, until the systems were replaced, every time that a TV station presented weather radar displays, the data had gone through my hardware and software. [It was great fun to design the board and the software that ran on it... I just wish that I'd retained the listings of the boot ROM, as it was able to detect the one failing CPU in all 200 boards!] A few years ago I received the prototype hardware from an ex-colleague who had kept some of the artifacts from the company that we'd belonged to, and it was a thrill to see it again.
From: "ben via cctalk" <[email protected]> To: "cctalk" <[email protected]> Cc: "ben" <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, November 23, 2025 8:13:48 PM Subject: [cctalk] who has a computer of your very own Who has strange or one of a kind computers out there? I have a 18 bit homebrew (cpld) with 256Kb ram and just a bootstrap loader.
