Finally she is arrived
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She's arrived! After many years of fussing and prevaricating I've finally
taken the plunge and bought myself an Atom. The prices were rocketing in
the bay of E, and I reckoned on the time being nigh. This one was
advertised as having a broken key and otherwise with little hope of
receiving a working box I decided on taking a punt and fixing it up if
necessary. I've always loved this machine. I owned one as a boy although
it was only a half-populated board without a case. It still did the
business though! I must admit to being a little saddened when I
opened the wrapping. It was grubby and half of the keys appeared to be
smashed in, sitting a good 6-7mm lower than their neighbours. The 1st
thing was to open it up and check the power supply status. The Atom was
infamous for overheating and many owners bypassed the internal
regulators in favour of feeding it a regulated 5v diet. |
As was indeed
the case with this one. It had received some tweaks in its time, but I
was really happy to see the work was all of a high standard. These were
all what I call 'magazine hacks' - the electronic equivalent of a
one-liner joke. Single wire patches for enabling an eighth bit on the
printer port, joining some lines to an external socket for wiring a
joystick, nothing major. I was chuffed to see that it was fully expanded
memory and support-chip wise. 12K RAM & 12K ROM plus a utility kit
that I'm still having trouble finding any info about. I'll have to
resort to a disassembler I think. No colour board but then I wouldn't
ever have even contemplated that. Too rare.
The mother and key
boards were in a real state. I think it had been stored on top of
kitchen cupboards at some point in its life and it had received a good
layering of yellow grease and fibres. Some keys were sticking and this
was the main reason. I've since scrubbed it with a toothbrush and plenty
of warm soapy water and now you'd never know! I was shy of putting it
in the dishwasher as some people recommend, this may be ok for generic
PC keyboards but rare vintage '80s hardware...
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At some point in its history the three keys in the lower left had been
replaced. They were replaced with high quality keyswitches, which - well
I never - made the keycaps sit higher. What had happened was that the
previous owner had raised the original keycaps with superglue to match
the height of the replacements. The original mechanism is a cheap
spring-based creation which I've only ever seen in Atoms ... and a
keypad that I was given recently! That was handy, wasn't it! So I hacked
the keypad and replaced the switches with something contemporary and
far more suitable. And the same height! The caps all came off and were
cleaned and repaired where necessary.
The machine is now clean and tidy, ready for work.
One
tough trick was finding a plug to fit the odd power socket dimensions.
It's some olde fashioned imperial jack size. Eventually located with the
assistance of an Atom owning colleague I was able to juice the old
girl. To my immense surprise it eventually reset and presented me with
the very comforting words: ACORN ATOM > Joy!Posted by Sir Morris
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De reactie van Kees van Oss
Hi Charlie,
my name is Kees van Oss and I'm living in the Netherlands.
I bought an Atom in 1980 and still own it. It has been expanded in many ways, hardware and software.
My Atom as an I2C interface, 3 ISA-slots with ethernet adapter and a mouse with hardware screenpointer.
I also have writtten the Atomic Windows ROM, extra basic commands to build a graphic dialog box with mouse control.
You can check it out on: Atom Review
Select Atom Specials and then Special 3.
I have my own site but it's Dutch:
www.home.zonnet.nl/oss003
At the moment, when I can find some time, I am still writing programs for the Atom.
I read in your Blog that you managed to make an MMC-interface, that's very interresting
because MMC is a project still on my todo-list. Also making an IDE interface is on my list.
It is nice to see that the Atom is still alive.
Greetings
Kees van Oss
24 October 2008
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