[NTLK] Armstice board (was: Unused Messagepad)

[Andrei Chichak]

I referred to it as a Newton on a board. It was a NuBus board that would fit into the bus of a Mac, back when Macs used MC68K and powerPC processors.  (google NuBus, look at wiki page)

I can’t find a picture of the board, but imagine a computer expansion card with a lonely ARM processor, a huge array of memory, and I seem to remember a huge LSI logic chip. Forgive me if I got it wrong, that was 1993.

The idea was to develop code using surrogate hardware but use the display on your Mac as the display of the Newton, your mouse was the pen. On the back edge was a PCMCIA slot that stuck out the back of your Mac, a DIN jack for communications (since the serial ports on the original Newton Notepads didn’t work properly).

You would write your code in the Newton Toolkit (NTK) then, using a Mac program, download it to the Armistice board. Your program would run on the ARM processor, but what would normally go to the LCD display of the Newton was shown in a window on the Mac. Mouse clicks became taps, and click moves became drawings.

Let’s see, what else do I remember? You’d have to put a piece of tape on your memory cards to give you a handle to pull them out of the card slot.  

There was two pieces of software Hammer and Egger or something like that. And, to this day, when one of my programs fail, I say it “clanks”. When your program failed on the Armistice board, you wold get a clank sound. 

Andrei


> On 2017-February-28, at 10:27 AM, Doug <ispinn at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2017 at 4:59 AM, <newtontalk-request at newtontalk.net> wrote:
>> 
>> Let me know if it was registered to me.
>> 
>> My Armistice board was left in my work Quadra 840AV when I left the UAlberta hospital. I tried to save the machine, but they hemmed and hawed, and eventually disposed of it.
>> 
>> Thinking of it makes me grumpy.
> 
> I'm curious about the hardware. Google suggests it's something to do
> with in-circuit programming. Could any of you hardware savvy guys
> elaborate?
> 
> Doug
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