MCM/70 Replica Embodies Proud Canadian Heritage
When a vintage computer system is all but unobtanium, application emulation is often all that continues to be. Unless you are [Michael Gardi], who saw an possibility to reproduce Canada’s dwelling-grown MCM/70 microcomputer working with a mixture of software package emulation and fashionable hardware.
Shorter of setting up a brand name new MCM/70 from the original schematics, this trustworthy facsimile of the MCM/70 does almost everything it can to pay homage to the original machine. The foundations of this job can be attributed to the York University Pc Museum (YUCoM) MCM/70E emulator, really regarded for its “historical accuracy”. The MCM/70 applied dual cassette tapes for storage and a funky 32-character dot matrix plasma exhibit, which is all reproduced in software program (other versions dropped a person of the cassette drives for a modem, bleeding edge innovation for 1974 microcomputing).
From here, [Michael] established off to assemble the many actual physical parts of the primary laptop or computer. The chassis itself was constructed from scratch applying a combination of 3D printing and common woodwork. The significant-voltage plasma exhibit was recreated employing four HCMS-2972 dot matrix modules, which minimal compromises. The initial personal computer used display screen memory as extra storage when executing recommendations, which established a sporadic blinkenlights effect on the initial exhibit. This new display sadly will not reproduce this ‘thinking’ sample, but it is a compact sacrifice.
Likewise, the first keyboard was heading to be tough to replicate with 100% precision, so a brand name-new recreation of an Ohio Scientific pc keyboard was made use of instead. The layouts are incredibly very similar, and everyone besides your most dedicated Canadian retro computing fanatics possibly would not recognize the difference. Becoming a modern day recreation of a classic keyboard, this was relatively uncomplicated to resource. A set of customized-produced keycaps with APL legends truly assisted market the reproduction.
And although doing the job dual cassette drives would have introduced this venture dwelling, it is commendable that [Michael] has made ‘working’ cassette drives making use of 3D printed cassettes and some magnetic magic using corridor influence sensors to identify the loaded cassette. The emulator incorporates a few digital cassette tapes which produced this option achievable.
If this all seems common, it may possibly be since this venture was based on a superb Hackaday writeup of the MCM/70. A genuinely innovative computer system for its time, the tale driving Micro Laptop Equipment (not to be confused with the toy cars) is a intriguing tale, and the generate-up is value a study if you have not noticed it now.
