More vintage computer photos. This time it’s a Z80 processor based CP/M system that started life as another unfinished Franklin project. Bob Grieb was designing the hardware and I was developing the software for what would have been a portable CP/M machine. The cool thing was that we were so totally under the radar and had essentially complete control over all aspects of the design. We had a working hardware prototype at Franklin but the bulk of the software was written after we’d left.

A vendor at Trenton Computer Festival had purchased a large amount of Franklin stock but had no idea what some of it was. Bob discovered the bare CP/M PC boards, populated several and coded low level disk formatting routines while I wrote the boot firmware, CP/M BIOS, ZCPR and assorted utilities. The end result is actually a slick little CP/M machine that includes two floppy disk drives and a sizable RAM disk made from extra RAM banks.

I think I christened it the BoGUS board, as far as I can remember it stood for Bob Grieb’s Unusual System or something like that. I’m sure it’s in the source code somewhere.

[Show as slideshow]

Top view

Front view

Motherboard

Boot screen

Boot screen close-up

Running CP/M 2.2

Disk Copy

Disk parameters

MDM740!

Character set

Beauty shot

Here are photos of Franklin Computer’s unreleased Apple II compatible computer dubbed the CX (code named “Kite”.) Not exactly a lightweight machine at about 25 pounds, the official term for it was “luggable” rather than portable.

Franklin went into bankruptcy before it shipped, but about 20 or so were built from available parts and given to some of the last people out the door, of which I was one.

I donated this machine to someone’s collection so I don’t have it any more.

[Show as slideshow]

Not a suitcase

Front view

Keyboard

Booting

Running FUD

FUD close-up

Running CP/M

CP/M close-up

Rear view

Rear close-up

Ports