[Coco] TC-9

[Joel Ewy]

I have a TC-9, Chuck.  I have to say I've never been able to put it to
very good use.  It (mine at least) was always a bit flaky in operation. 
One of the main problems I had with it was that I could never get a hard
drive hooked up to it.  For some reason, it was incompatible with the
Disto SCII, which I already had.  So no no-halt floppy, and no 4-in-1
for RTC and SCSI.  Before I got that figured out, I bought an MM/1, and
the Tomcat sat mostly unused.

I bought just the (populated) boards for the TC-9 (as I did for the
MM/1), so I had to supply my own case, power supply, keyboard, drives,
and even cables.  One irritating mis-feature of the TC-9 was that the
expansion bus header pins were arranged for some kind of crazy
backwards-wired ribbon cable.  When I made my own I had to separate the
ribbon conductors into pairs, twist each pair, and then crimp that in an
IDC.  What on Earth they were thinking when they designed it that way is
way beyond my comprehension.  Maybe my homebrew cable is a factor in its
unreliability.  I don't know.

I don't think I have a schematic, but I can try to scan the manual I do
have.  Maybe I can take some pictures of the beast, too. 

Crazy question:  Does anybody know if there's any danger of static
discharging through stuff you put on a flatbed scanner?  Specifically,
is it safe to scan floppy disks?  If the consensus seems to be that
there's no danger, then I'll scan the boot disk so everybody can see
what the label looks like.

Eventually I should make the other kind of image of the floppy and copy
the EPROMs.  Since they are EPROMs and not masked ROMs, those really
should be backed up anyway.

JCE


Chuck Youse wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> Just a change of topic.  I've never even *seen* a TC-9, can't even find
> a picture of one via Google.  Anyone own one?  Have any technical
> information on them?  I'd love to get my hands on some info on this
> cousin of the Coco 3 - or even a machine itself (fat chance.. I know..)
>
> Schematics would be _superb_ ..
>
> C.
>
>
>
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