Compucorp 625 II

[cesare]

I'm wondering if anyone has any information about these machines - my attempts to find anyone else with a working one has drawn a blank so far.

The machine is an S-100 design, with dual 5.25 floppy, a printer and video controller along with a processor board. My example had a dodgy video RAM chip, and some dodgy capacitors in the VDU, but sorting these out gets me to the point when the machine is now attempting to boot from floppy, and the display characters are correct, and pretty stable:

I happen to have a disk which thinks it's got the OS on it (zebra) although it is failing to boot, but given the age of the disks and the age of the drives, and the not-so-fantastic decision to mount these vertically, it's not clear whether I should tear down and clean a drive with the hope that it gets things further along.

Anyhow, an enjoyable project so far, and if anyone has any info about these, it would be greatly appreciated.

Some snaps of the inside for those interested:

 

[NeXT]

Vertical loading floppy drives. That's hot!

 

[cesare]

Yeah, the vertical floppies are weird, it could have had a tandy TRS-80 layout if it wasn't for the printer. It suggests the printer was more important. Given the company made plenty of calculators, i'm guessing this is aimed at accounts/payroll type applications, and the integrated printer is probably taken from that world and was probably what people spent their day doing rather than swapping floppies. Of course it might just have been a terrible design, and the fact i've not seen another one ever does rather suggest something wasn't quite right with it.

 

[nullvalue]

That is one seriously strange computer. The fact they put the printer up front and not the disk drives?? Also seems strange to mount the CRT on the right and not on the left (more in line with the alpha keys).. it's baffling and I love it! Hope you can find some more info on it. You should probably do a dump of those EPROMS.

 

[VERAULT]

Whats going on with the floppy drive doors? Those blue things; seems like the flappers are missing and those were put in their place.

 

[cesare]

They are micropolis 1015 drives, and the blue part is blue anodised I presume aluminium. They seem to operate as expected, pulling down to lock the mechanism, in place, although the disks do not eject very well, old gummed up grease I presume, the springs look to be intact. Given i've never seen even a picture of one of these anywhere else, I really can't say whether this is original to the machine!

I think giving a drive a tear down and clean will be worth doing, if only to make the mechanism operate more smoothly.