What you see on the left is a series of “screens” which I dumped to my printer while signed on to Compuserve’s demo area. Two hours of connect time, to that area only, are provided with Byte Back Md-2 Modem. The MD-2 has been reviewed in Syntax and other magazines and is an excellent piece of hardware, Little has been said about the kit version, however.
The MD-2 kit costs $119.00 while the assembled and tested version is $149.00. Unless you are a very experienced kit builder, I must advise you to steer clear of the kit. The parts and directions are all there but, I suspect you’ll find them exquisitely difficult to follow. The documentation consists of 3 1/2 dot-matrix printed pages, a parts list, a few sketches and, thank goodness, a schematic. Step by step directions are not given, except for the very crucial stages.
I found several directions either wrong or missing (step H says R32 and means R31, the sketch below step 6 is missing, and figure 4 is a mystery to me). The parts packages were not marked to show their contents. Finally, several critical connections must be made on the back side of the board, one to an IC pin directly (no trace or hole available), others with wires tacked-on to pairs of series resistors whose common leads are “flapping in the breeze”.
If all I’ve said so far has made you decide to turn thumbs down to the MD-2, please reserve judgement and read on. Despite the poor documentation and somewhat hurried use of jumpers and trace cuts, once the unit is assembled it works very well.
My MD-2 worked the first time I properly configured it in 16K (for some reason my 2K program would not LOAD). We’ve also interfaced it with an EP-44 typewriter, hooked up as a printer, with excellent results. Byte Back used some excellent IC’s (the 1488,89’s are hard to destroy) and has produced a reliable hardware, software package. I give the assembled MODEM a 9, and the kit a 7 on my 1-to-10 scale. Both would have ranked higher if more documentation and software (including source listings and/or entry points) had been supplied.