[Coco] RiBBS

[Joel Ewy]

Dave Kelly wrote:
> Ron Bihler wrote:
>> Ok,
>> So I have been sucked back into the Coco Community.  After doing some
>> research I can't beleive the following is as strong as it is.  Lot's
>> of passon and opionons make it very interesting.
>>
>> So can someone update me, when I left the MM1 was being intoduced and
>> only a few of the first editions where being released.  Much of my
>> interest is in what happened to RiBBS,
> John Donaldson was doing some updating and porting of RIBBS to the
> MM1.  He decided to leave his job here in Houston and move to West
> Viginia. When he did I bought all his Coco OS9 stuff. Shortly after
> the Penn Fest I sold everything I had at the Chicago Fest.
>
> Do not remember who bought it. Maybe someone in this group does. It
> was on 5 1/4 inch floppies and the MM1 hard drive.  Boisy was it you
> who bought the computer that John had built from a Paul Ward kit?
>
> To keep this update going, Kevin Pease designed a MM1 for Keisler
> (thats not right, guy who wrote 'ar' the compression thingy)
> Electronics.  Several people sold it. Bill Whitman, for one. Later
> David Black took over marketing it.

A little clarification.  There were (at least) two entirely different
computers marketed as the MM/1.  The original MM/1 was designed and
built by Interactive Media Systems (IMS).  It uses the Signetics 68070
and the 66470 VSC.  These chips were also used in some of the first
generation CD-i players, though the CD-i players used a pair of 66470s
so they could get 16-bit color.  The original MM/1 also has a backplane
board (just a simple bus with a resistor pack or two and a couple header
connectors) that connects the CPU board with the I/O board.  The CPU
board has floppy, video, keyboard, and a couple serial ports built in,
along with 1M of RAM soldered onto the board that serves as system and
video RAM.  The I/O board added (I think potentially 3) more serial
ports, two parallel ports, SCSI, RTC, 2 8-bit ADC/DAC chips for sound
in/out, and joysticks, and up to 2M additional RAM in 30-pin SIMMs.

Somewhere along the line, IMS sold the rights of the MM/1 to Blackhawk
Enterprises (David Graham).  Blackhawk sold remaining stock of IMS MM/1
equipment, and also had a redesign of the backplane and the I/O board. 
I know that the version 2 backplane and I/O board were done by Kevin
Pease.  He may have been the original designer of the MM/1 equipment. 
I'm not sure about that.  In this version, the backplane becomes a
memory board that supports up to 2 4M 30-pin SIMMs.  Memory is moved off
the I/O board, and a later version of the SCSI chip is used.  It is
these boards that I was assembling for Blackhawk.  I've got 8M of RAM on
my MM/1 not including the 1M on the CPU board.

But since there were problems with the Ver. 2 I/O board, David Graham
also sold AT306 motherboards as the MM/1b while Kevin and Ray Patterson
tried to work out the bugs in the SCSI interface of the original MM/1. 
I think the AT306 is the same board that Carl Kreider was selling.  This
was a motherboard with a m68306 processor and an ISA bus so you could
plug PC peripherals in and take advantage of cheap commodity hardware,
if you could cook up drivers.  Even though the hardware was very
different from the original MM/1, David Graham called it the MM/1b
because the licenses he had for OS-9/68K and the OS-9 Port Pack were
valid "only for the MM/1".

I didn't think that Kevin Pease had anything to do with the development
of the AT306/MM/1b, but I won't claim to have authoritative knowledge of
that one way or another.

JCE
>
> John is in the Dallas area now. I get e-mails from him several times a
> week. Do not know if he is still subscribed to this list, maybe Dennis
> can look at the file and say yes or no.
>
> Regards,
> Dave
>
>
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