Wednesday, February 14, 2024

How 1984 wasn't like "1984."

In 1984, I was working at Hayes Microcomputer Products. They were the premiere modem manufacturer for small computers, back in the days when modems over telephone lines were a primary means of computer to computer and user to computer communications. 

In my job, I created communications software to talk to the modems. The software dialed the modem, established connection, provided terminal emulation (my specialty), allowed for the capture of the data stream to files, printing, file transfer with the remote computer (using protocols like XMODEM and YMODEM), and other features. 

These were the early days of personal computing. IBM introduced the PC in 1981, and it had rapidly evolved into a defacto standard computer, shoving out various CP/M designs from the previous decade. Personal computers were so new, people were trying to figure out what to do with them. Word processing, spreadsheets and other office applications had just been introduced. 

Hayes was trying to stay at the forefront. We had a laboratory filled with pretty much one of every personal computer, and when new ones came out, we would buy one. In late 1983, we got an Apple Lisa. It was a very different kind of computing experience. It was a curiosity to us, and as there was no programming environment available, we didn't see how we could build software to talk to a modem. Plus, at the price point, there were few buyers.

The Macintosh

Though the Macintosh was introduced in January of 1984, I didn't get hands on one until the late spring of 1984. Yes, we brought one into the lab, and it immediately garnered a lot of attention. 

While there were similarities to the Apple Lisa, the small screen with square pixels just seemed sharper and more distinct. The whole interface was friendly and approachable. We messed with MacWrite, MacPaint, and MacDraw. We printed on an ImageWriter, making appreciably decent images unlike anything we could do on another type of computer. There were several of us hooked and enthusiastic.

It's hard to describe those days. At this point, everyone has had decades to become familiar with computers that use a graphical user interface and a mouse or other pointing device to interact. Back then, it was a revelation. It was much more approachable than the command-line interfaces of the day. 

As I described it to someone in the early 90s -- other computer interfaces required one to reach toward the computer. You had to learn the special language and commands of that computer. The Macintosh was the first computer that reached back toward you -- the user.

The Machine

The Macintosh was based on a 16-bit Motorola MC68000 processor, running at 8 MHz. This was more than competitive with the Intel-based IBM clones circulating at the time. This processor was a great choices by Apple. It had many registers and powerful instructions for manipulating the bit-mapped screen.

Biggest constraint was memory. The 128 KB in the Macintosh was shared with 24 KB used for the screen, several more KB for operating system usage, leaving about 90 KB to run your program. Most of the critical operating system routines were in the Macintosh ROMs, which saved space. Building a program of any sophistication was difficult -- It was very tight to work with.

The single 400 KB floppy disk drive was also a limitation. Trying to save a file to another diskette could produce an endless amount of swapping. It was the lack of addition storage that kept me from buying a Mac until the Mac SE/20 was introduced in 1987. 

Next Steps

By summer, Hayes hired some consultants to look into the feasibility of developing communications software for the Macintosh. In just a few weeks, they had some rudimentary software going and concluded that it was quite feasible. 

We were soon green lighted to create a product for the Macintosh.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Forty Years of Personal Computing - Gimix 256 KB Static RAM

256 KB Gimix Static RAM board, sans battery.
In 1991, my employer moved to a new building. Before the move, we cleaned out storage closets containing old equipment. Much of this was obsolete gear. Things like pairs of "twiggy" disk drives removed from early Apple Lisa systems upgraded to 3 1/2" disks in 1985.

In one closet, we discovered something unusual. It was a complete Gimix III "Ghost" system. This was a  2 MHz 6809 system sporting a fifteen-slot SS-50 motherboard and eight SS-30 slots and floppy disks: a top-of-the-line 6809 system from the early 1980s. 

By 1991, the company had no use for this equipment. I had the impulse to take the entire system home, but I didn't have room. My wife and I were living in a small house and the garage was already packed. She would not have been happy if I brought home a bunch of equipment. 

Instead, I salvaged exactly one board -- a Gimix 256K CMOS Static RAM board. It sported 256 KB of memory, with several options, including battery backup. The rest was scrapped by an electronics recycler. 

Obtaining the board, I tried it out in my system. I was able to map in 4 KB blocks of memory and test them. They all worked. I might use the additional memory as part of a virtual disk drive. 

In 1994, I moved, and the entire system was stored away for over 25 years. Looking at it recently, I found it needed repair. Over the years, the backup battery failed and leaked electrolyte on the board and motherboard. Several Molex connectors are damaged, and need to be replaced. Some of the components show signs of corrosion from the battery electrolyte. 

I removed the failed battery. I do hope the rest of the board still works once the repairs are complete. Perhaps I'll fix it in my retirement.

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

Forty Years of Personal Computing - MC6809 V2

MC6809 CPU card, version 2.
By March 1988, the MC6809E V1 card I designed in 1983 needed updates. I built an entirely new card with new features intended to run OS-9 more effectively. 

CPU

A MC6809 chip simplified things with the on-chip clock oscillator. The chip handled M.RDY without extra logic, and the rising edge of the Q clock did not need delay.

Memory

The MC6809E V1 card had no on-board RAM. There wasn't room. By 1988, a number of manufacturers had 32 KB static RAMs in 28-pin packages. 64 KB of memory is realized with a couple of chips. 

For the V2 board, I allowed for eight chips, totaling 256 KB of memory. This was a good compromise between cost and the space available. The memory is logically separate from the rest of the card -- decoding from the physical address and data bus, using appropriate buffers. In this way, the memory can be accessed by a bus master other than the CPU. It responds to physical addresses C0000-FDFFF or FEFFF, jumper selectable. For years, it held two chips -- 64 KB on the board -- with only 56 KB accessible. The six remaining chips were added recently, making 248 KB or 252 KB accessible. 

Buffering

20-pin bus driver chips reduced the chip count, even with two sets of bus drivers, one for the CPU, and one for the memory array.

Program ROM

The design allows for a much larger ROM. The MC6809E V1 card originally had two 2KB 2716-compatible sockets -- one for a ROM and another for ROM or RAM. To make swapping OS-9 and BBUG easier, I changed this to a single 4 KB 2732-compatible ROM socket

For the MC6809 V2 board, the ROM can be a 2764, 27128 or 27256-compatible device, holding 8 KB, 16 KB or 32 KB, respectively. The larger ROM permitted more OS-9 modules to reside there, if desired. 

As built, a 2764-compatible EPROM is used, containing a BBUG image in one 4 KB half, and the OS-9 ROM image in the other 4 KB half. A jumper selects which half is active. This is much easier than swapping chips to go between BBUG and OS-9.

Accessing the correct amount of the ROM requires clever decoding. 

Decoder

A hard-wired decoder would limit the flexibility of the system, and it would be complex and difficult to change. Rather than discrete logic, the decoder consists of a Cypress Semiconductor CY2C291 2Kx8 EPROM. This is a fast device with a 70ns access time. The CPU address lines A5 to A15 are connected directly to A0 to A10 on the chip. The decoder is enabled with the logical OR of E and Q, which asserts during three quarters of the memory cycle. This way, the eight data output pins can be used as decoder selects programmable on every 32-byte segment of memory.

Three select lines are used: one for bus access (including the on-board memory array), one for the program ROM, and one for the DAT. Each select line is pulled up to +5v. Placing a 0 bit in the decoder ROM data array makes the select line active for that 32-byte memory segment. 

Modifying the memory map becomes a simple matter of programming the decoder ROM. I programmed the following logical memory map:
  • 0000-EFFF - Bus
  • F000-F77F - Program ROM
  • F780-F7FF - Bus
  • F800-FFFF - Program ROM
  • FFE0-FFFF - DAT (writes only)
This configuration is compatible with the existing ROMs for BBUG and OS-9, which require I/O at E000-E07F. It has 4KB of program ROM, except for the hole at F780-F7FF. This hole deserves a bit of explanation. 

I/O Port Address Migration

BBUG occupies the top 2 KB of ROM. The OS-9 ROMs take up nearly 4KB. However OS9p2 doesn't use the last 128 bytes of that space. This unused space became an alternate location for the I/O ports. If the I/O ports moved from E000-E07F to F780-F7FF, the MC6809 could use RAM in the logical E block (E000-EFFF), for a total of 60 KB of RAM, up from 56 KB. 

Moving the I/O address requires motherboard decoder changes and software changes to the BBUG and OS-9 ROMs, as well as revision to Flex09 and OS-9 I/O configurations. The V2 board decoder ROM would work with the existing motherboard, or with the motherboard and ROMs altered for the new I/O addresses.

Larger ROM

Once the I/O addresses are moved, the decoder can be reprogrammed to allow for more ROM space. This opens the option of moving OS-9 modules into ROM. The decoder allows the lower limit of the ROM to be changed in 32-byte increments. This allows an OS-9 system to be entirely in ROM. OS-9 would start from the reset button without requiring a boot disk.

DAT

Back side of MC6809 V2 card.

The DAT configuration is similar to the MC6809E V1 board, with one important difference. In the SWTPc MP-09 board, as well as my V1 board, the outputs of the DAT are inverted on the lower four bits (A12-A15), but non-inverted on the higher four bits (S0-S3). 

This means that values programmed into the DAT must be one's complemented on the lower four bits (A12-A15), with the higher four bits (S0-S3) not complemented. 

For the V2 board, all eight bits of the DAT are inverted on the bus. Thus, the value programmed into the DAT is the one's compliment of the highest eight physical address bits (A12-A15, S0-S3). 

Which makes programming correct DAT values simpler, since the entire byte is complemented.

I introduced a hardware bug in the DAT decoder. More on this later.

Building

Rather than wirewrap, I opted to try something new. A technician from work gave me a couple of 3M Scotchflex Breadboarding kits. This breadboarding system was brilliant. Chip sockets connected to IDC pins. Wiring is accomplished by forcing wire-wrap wire between the IDC pins with a special tool. 

It is way  easier than wire-wrap, because there's no tedious cutting, stripping, threading and winding of wire. One lays the wire down and pushes it on to the pins. Wiring several connections in succession, such as with a bus, is a breeze. The results also look great. The IDC pins are low profile, so there's less chance of shorting a connection than with wire-wrap.

It's sad 3M discontinued this product. It was great. 3M has since re-used the Scotchflex brand on three other products.

Fixing the Bug

The MC6809 V2 board worked great. There were no wiring errors. I did find a problem with the DAT.

In the default BBUG and OS-9 configuration, the DAT is written once during reset and never touched. And that seemed to work just fine.

Then I started playing with an OS-9 driver called VDisk. It created a virtual disk from selected extended memory blocks. At the time, I had 56 KB of memory from the MC6809 V2 card, plus another 60 KB from the Digital Research Computers / Tanner card. That made possible a 60 KB virtual disk.

Every time I tried to access the virtual disk, the computer would crash. This took a while to track down. 

I eventually realized the new decoder did not take into account the clock cycle when accessing the DAT. Transients on the R/W* line early in the clock cycle could cause bad data to be written to the DAT. After I added the missing gate, the Disk driver worked perfectly. 

Usage

Like the MC6809E V1 board, this V2 board was exactly how I wanted it. There are only two jumpers. 

The jumper at the top edge of the board selects the 4KB portion of the EPROM. This makes it easy to switch between OS-9 and BBUG. No more hassle of changing out chips - just move a jumper.

The jumper in the middle of the board, just above the decoder ROM enables the FE000-FEFFF block of on-board memory. This would be installed once the motherboard I/O addresses are moved out of the E-block of memory and would allow 60 KB of RAM to be used.

Future

Moving the I/O addresses out of the E-block gains 4KB more usable memory for OS-9. Perhaps I'll try that in my retirement.

Another fun project would be to put a full OS-9 Level I system into ROM. Unfortunately, all of the essential modules take up just over 16 KB of memory, so the division doesn't fall on a natural 4 KB boundary. This might cause a conflict accessing extended memory with the DAT.  I'd also have to figure out how to program the decoder ROM. There are not many EPROM programmers that can program the Cypress Semiconductor CY2C291 devices, and I no longer have access to the ones I originally used. 

OS-9 Level II

This design works well for OS-9 Level I. To run OS-9 Level II, which allows each process to have a full 64 KB address space, requires more hardware. First, a second set of DAT memory chips allows the user and supervisors states to have separate memory maps. Second, a means of switching between those maps automatically -- like when servicing and returning from interrupts. Third, would require ROM to be accessible from an extended memory address, and then mapped into the supervisor space. 

Those requirements go beyond the scope of this design. Perhaps there's room for a V3 board. All of this assumes access to a copy of OS-9 Level II, which may be difficult to find. 

    Thursday, November 30, 2023

    Forty Years of Personal Computing - 5 1/4" WD2797 Disk Controller

    WD2797 controller card for 5 1/4" drives
    To work on OS-9, I borrowed some 5 1/4" drives, and used the SWTPc DC-2 controller. This allowed me to boot up OS-9. Single-sided, single-density, 40-track diskettes hold about 100 KB -- they were quite limited on space.

    Running OS-9 on single-sided, single-density 8" disks, the situation was a little better, as each drive has about 300 KB of storage. But my two-drive system was limited. Plus, I was something of an island. None of my friends using OS-9 had 8" disks, so I couldn't exchange data with them. It was time to consider 5 1/4" drives.

    5 1/4" disk drives went through considerable evolution since their 1976 introduction. The early drives were single-sided, single-density with only 35 tracks. By 1987, double-sided, double-density drives sporting 80 tracks were common. These disks could hold about 640 KB, more than twice what my single-sided, single-density 8" drives held. (And more than single-sided, double-density 8" drives could as well)

    Disk Controller

    In August 1987, I designed a 5 1/4" floppy disk controller. The 5 1/4" controller is very similar to the 8" design, with appropriate changes for the disk interface. 

    A MOTOR ON* signal is generated any time the WD2797 is accessed, with a one-shot multivibrator holding that signal for 10 seconds. Another one-shot asserts the READY signal on the WD2797 after a second of MOTOR ON*. 5 1/4" disks always have the heads loaded, so HLD is tied to HLT.
    Back side of 5 1/4" controller

    Double-density is jumper-selectable to either follow drive select bit 7, or the SSO output. Side selection is controlled by drive select bit 6. Write pre-compensation isn't used, as it was unnecessary for 5 1/4" disks. 

    I built the controller the same piece of 0.1" perfboard that originally held the FD1771 disk controller for 8" disks. The board is a little bit smaller than the WD2797 controller for 8" disks, so it appears more densely packed. Wire-wrap techniques are used for the wiring, and a handful of connectors and discrete parts are soldered.

    Drives

    For initial troubleshooting, I borrowed the two drives and power supply from a Sage II computer from work, which I had to return. I needed my own drives.

    How many drives did I need?  I decided three drives would be sufficient -- one boot disk, and two working disks. This would allow me to copy disk to disk, while still having the boot disk with commands in place. (and no crazy disk-swapping for copies like the original Macintosh that had one disk drive!)

    I bought two Tandon TM100-4 drives at a local hamfest. These were common surplus from Lanier word processing units at that time. When I went to buy a third drive, I could no longer find any. I ended up with a Mitsubishi M4853 drive. The specs of the drives are virtually identical, except the Mitsubishi is a half-height drive.  

    Drive Cabinet

    5 1/4" Drive Cabinet
    Finding a cabinet to house three drives was a problem. New metal cabinets are very expensive, particularly in larger sizes, and I couldn't find anything suitable on the surplus market. 

    September 1987, I built a wooden cabinet to proper dimensions for three TM100-4 drives. I used 1/4" plywood, reinforced at the corners with 1x1/2 strips. The bottom, back, sides and one quarter front panel are all glued together as one unit. The top screws on to the four corner posts. The finished unit is quite sturdy. 

    As originally built, the cabinet was plain unfinished plywood. I recently sanded and finished it with a couple of coats of polyurethane.
    Inside the box, plenty of room.

    Power comes from a 12 volt, 5 amp supply. 5 volts is provided from a single LM7805 regulator mounted to that supply. In retrospect, the LM7805 might be a bit over-taxed. I suspect the drives draw less power than their maximum specifications. Heat is removed from the cabinet by a small (but noisy) muffin fan on the back panel.

    A power switch and neon pilot light round out the front panel, giving a clear indication the unit is on.

    The controller and drives work great, easily formatting  double-side, double-density disks using 80 tracks. 

    Drives & Software

    In April of 1989, I revised all the disk drivers to handle double-density, double-sided drives. The BBUG monitor "D" command code was updated to look for double-density sectors, and the boot loader for Flex09 updated to read double-density, double-sided disks.

    For OS-9, I modified an existing driver (FD2) for the Processor Technology PT69 to work with my disk controller and created a new boot disk with several drive descriptors. The drivers and descriptors allowed for 40-track disks (which required double-stepping of tracks, and adjusting the track register), and SWTPc format, where track 0 is formatted single-density -- as well as the standard, double-density, double-sided, 80-track format.

    I updated the Boot module to handle double-density, double-sided disks and burned a new OS-9 ROM. 

    The result is a smart, efficient unit roughly the same size as the SWTPc 6800 Computer System cabinet. The fan is a little noisy, but was typical for the day. 

    Future

    The Tandon and Mitsubishi drives only require 250 ms to get up to speed after MOTOR ON*. I can shorten the timing on the one-shot driving the READY signal.

    If I can manage to find a second Mitsubishi M4853 drive, four drives would fit into the cabinet. I'd need to add a second LM7805 regulator for the 5-volt supply, and split the 5-volt output across two drives for each.

    One limitation of the WD2797 is the track to track and head settling time. These drives can move track to track in 3 ms and need 15 ms for the head to settle. The WD2797, using a 1 MHz clock for 5 1/4" drives, can only do 6 ms and 30 ms, respectively.

    Western Digital did manufacture another device, the WD1772-00. This was a 28-pin floppy disk controller for 5 1/4" drives that is software compatible with the WD179x and WD279x devices. The WD1772-00 allows faster track to track and head settling times -- up to 2 ms and 15 ms. 

    The biggest problem is finding one, as the WD1772-00 wasn't used in a lot of designs, and Western Digital stopped manufacturing them over a decade ago. Might be interesting for a V3 floppy disk controller card.




    Sunday, November 26, 2023

    Halfway through the DXCC Challenge

    Twenty years ago, when I first started uploading my logs to Logbook of the World, I began to pursue the DXCC Challenge award. I created lists of confirmations that I had, and began to try to fill in the band / countries I was missing. This has continued for years. 

    In April of 2016, I gathered sufficient confirmations to earn the DXCC Challenge award. Since then, I've continued to pursue new band / countries practically every time I am on the air.

    This month, I passed another milestone. Currently, there are 340 entities on the DXCC list. And the DXCC Challenge counts on ten bands, from 160m through 6m. That makes 3400 total items for DXCC Challenge. 

    I recently collected confirmations over 1700 items on the DXCC Challenge. That's the half-way point. It's only going to get harder after this.

    Tuesday, October 31, 2023

    Forty Years of Personal Computing - OS-9 Level I

    I learned about OS-9 in early 1983, when it was new. What I heard mainly concerned BASIC09 and at that time BASIC didn't interest me. That was unfortunate. OS-9 is a miniature Unix clone, optimized for the 6809.

    Baud rate generator and
    counter/timer board

    Requirements

    By fall of 1986, I tired of the limitations of Flex09, and started looking at OS-9. Bringing up an OS-9 system didn't have the same challenges as Flex09,  since OS-9 can format 8" diskettes. OS-9 does have additional hardware requirements. It needs a periodic source of interrupts. 

    Interrupt Logic

    The OS-9 CLOCK module has logic for several interrupt sources, using chips available at the time. The MC6840 programmable counter/timer chip, with three 16-bit programmable counter/timers, was one option. The MC6840 fit nicely on the bit rate generator board. The driver allowed two circuit variations.

    The circuit I chose exercises all three counter/timers.  Timer 1 counts 50,000 cycles, then trips Timer 2 and 3. Timer 2 counts twice and signals an interrupt. Timer 3 counts down from 90. In this way, Timer 2 provides regular interrupts every 50 ms on a 2 MHz system. Timer 3 counts interrupts and adjusts the system clock whether or not the Timer 2 interrupt is serviced every 50 ms.

    ROMs

    The OS-9 kernel has two modules burned into ROM: OS9p1 and OS9p2. I obtained two 2KB ROMs and programmed them with the images. OS9p1 resides at F800. OS9p1 initializes the kernel, then searches for installed modules, which are position-independent. The second ROM contains OS9p2, Init and Boot. Once OS9p1 finds the OS9p2 module, it initializes it. OS9p2 looks for certain key modules, like IOMan. If they cannot be found, it uses the Boot module to load the rest of OS-9 from a floppy disk.

    Once initialized, OS9p2 uses the information in the Init module to start executing. During a soft reset, OS-9 does not always load from disk. If the modules are not altered, OS9p2 can find them and bypass the boot process. 

    The modular structure of OS-9 allows great flexibility. Modules can be in ROM or loaded from storage devices. The Init module provides the configuration to execute the first module.

    Bootstrapping

    With a little help from a working OS-9 system, bootstrapping was straightforward. The ROMs I started with were pretty generic SWTPc system ROMs. The MC6840 occupied the bit rate generator board. I borrowed a 5 1/2" disk drive and plugged the DC-2 controller into I/O slot 1, with the 8" controller in I/O slot 2. Armed with a single-sided, single-density 5 1/4" boot disk, I successfully booted OS-9. That was the hard part.

    From there, I created a new 5 1/4" boot disk with drivers and configuration for my 8" drives. Booting from this new disk, I formatted 8" disks and moved the OS-9 files to them. I then created an 8" OS-9 boot disk with a new I/O configuration and drivers for both 8" and  5 1/4" drives. At that point, I swapped the floppy disk controller slots, with the 8" controller in I/O slot 1, and the DC-2 in I/O slot 2. (The Boot module is configured to find a WDC-compatible floppy disk controller at the address for slot 1)

    At that point, I could boot OS-9 from my 8" drives, and was able to copy files from the 5 1/4" disks. Compared with bringing up Flex09, this was easy.

    I tailored my configuration to suit my hardware, and updated the ROMs with customized modules.

    Swapping BBUG/Flex09 and OS-9

    While I was using OS-9, I would swap back to BBUG and Flex09 on occasion. This was a pain. I would swap out the two 2 KB ROMs and use a different boot disk. 

    In late October of 1986, I modified the MC6809E V1 board to use a single 4 KB 2732 ROM. This put all of the OS-9 kernel on one chip, and allowed room to expand BBUG. With this modification, only one chip was swapped.

    Extended Memory

    Working with OS-9 uncovered an issue with extended memory addressing. December 1986, I installed a 74LS21 4-input NAND gate on the SWTPc motherboard to decode the top address bits S0-S3. This placed the I/O addresses at FE000. With the MC6809E V1 board, this worked great with BBUG and Flex09. BBUG initialized the E-block of the DAT with a value F1 -- which the board would interpret as physical address FE000. 

    However, I found I could not boot into OS-9 any more. Turns out, OS-9 initializes the E-block of the DAT using a value 01, which the board interpreted as physical address 0E000. With the extended addressing decoder on the motherboard, the OS-9 Boot module could not communicate to the I/O devices. This forced me to disable the 74LS21 decoder.

    User Experience

    OS-9 Level I uses a single 64 KB memory space for the operating system, programs and data. That's not a lot of memory. Many OS-9 programs are small, being written in assembly language. Larger programs, like a compiler, load in as multiple passes, to conserve memory use.

    Using OS-9 is cool. It is a real-time, multi-tasking operating system, first available in 1982. Windows wouldn't have comparable functionality until 1989 (Windows NT), and the Mac in 1999 (MacOS X). Like Unix, you can spawn off programs to run concurrently in the background.

    Using a second serial port, I ran two users simultaneously, one from the main terminal, and one from the second serial port. I used a Wyse-85 terminal on the main port, and the old CT-64 on the second port. Amazing on an 8-bit machine with 56 KB of memory! 

    At some point, I hung a modem on the second port. I could leave the machine running at home and dial into it from work. 

    Saturday, September 30, 2023

    Forty Years of Personal Computing - Wyse-85 Terminal

    By the summer of 1985, my original CT-64 terminal felt limited. Sixteen rows of 64 characters didn't seem like enough. Especially when at work I regularly used screens with at least 25 rows of 80 characters. In 1977, terminals with such capabilities were around $1000 -- way beyond my modest budget. By 1985, much more capable terminals were available for about half that price. It was time to upgrade.

    August of 1985, I purchased a Wyse-85 terminal for about $700 -- a good price for the time. The terminal offed a DEC VT-220, VT-100 and VT-52 emulator, so it was plenty capable. It sported 24 or 25 rows of 80 or 132 columns on the screen. I purchased the green phosphor screen.

    The most important thing, however, about the Wyse-85 compared to the CT-64 was speed. The CT-64 was limited to a paltry 1200 bps. The Wyse-85 had a top speed of 38400 bps. Thirty-two times faster. The CT-64 would take more than eight seconds to write every character on the 16 x 64 screen. The Wyse-85 could write an entire 25 x 132 screen in less than a second. 

    The Wyse-85 was such a joy to use compared to the CT-64, I couldn't believe I hadn't done this sooner. 

    I did have trouble with this terminal when I tried to use it in the shack back in the late 1980s. The keyboard scan generated a fair amount of RFI. Putting several ferrite toroids on the keyboard cable helped a little, but did not eliminate the problem. 

    I still have this terminal. It's been stored in the original box since November of 1994. I hope it still works.