In this issue we have a few pages sent to us by Larry Crawford, one of our Canadian programmers and friends concerning a project that he and the late Bill Pedersen of WIDJUP were working loosely on. I too was working on this in another effort with Bill. Larry and I had not worked on this together, but may in the near future.
Bills ideas were to: (1) either bring the ROM operating system of the TS2068 out the back of the TS2068 in the form of either protected RAM (bank switchable) or in an easily changed eprom, (2) build a combo backplane (IBM used these in early days to configure and access peripherals for their computers) and motherboard that would allow us to do things such as add CGA or VGA graphics cards, SCSI, MFM, RLL or IDE hard drive interfaces, or most of all the other items that are used in the computing world of IBM, MAC and AMIGA. This would have been a great idea if it could have been cheaply implemented.
The reason I say cheaply implemented, was that most of us bought a TS2068 because it (1) did not cost a fortune,(2) AND WAS EASY TO USE! Most of the people I knew who have, or did have, a TS2068 liked the operating system. Most who left it did so in order to either find more complex or graphic oriented software and to gain access to higher tech peripherals. It would have been great to use a laser printer with the TS2068, scan in some graphics with a scanner (or text with an OCR scanner), or use a high speed fax/modem, just to name a few items. The operating system and the Sinclair Basic were what we wanted to keep about the TS2068 and the Spectrums. Old Sir Clive Sinclair did good in these areas. It just would have been nice to fire up the computer and select what you want to run from a menu on your hard drive!
The question now is…can this still be done? We still have motherboards available for the TS2068 from the John Oliger Company (as well as parallel printer interfaces, disk drive systems, dockport boards and eprom programmers). Can something be done with this and perhaps a board to tie into some IBM peripherals. A lot of this stuff has been dumped by the IBM compatible companies on the market dirt cheap right now. We need people to write software patches and drivers for this stuff. I have talked twice to John Oliger about the hardware end and he told me that getting the hardware of a hard drive to work on the TS2068 would not be real difficult. He did not seem to feel up to writing the software driver, and did not at the time feel that there would be enough demand to warrant his doing the hardware interface needed. It just may be that HE WOULD HELP SOMEONE ELSE IN THIS DIRECTION IF PROPERLY APPROACHED? Do we have enough qualified or energetic hardware hackers still left in our midst?
I still have fairly copious notes from Bill Pedersen on the necessary (but not complete) ROM changes he thought needed, and on directions for the hardware. I am willing to pass on copies of this data to people who feel like they are serious about pursuing this, but not to someone who will just collect and do nothing with the data. Perhaps Larry Crawford would also be willing to help out any such people . In this case we may still see the dream of Bill Pedersen come true. Those interested should call or write me care of UPDATE Magazine. Do not think that people are not using TS2068s anymore; in my Mechanical Affinity business we do not sell less TS2068s than QLs! We have still had new users.