tubetime

Interestingly enough, the YTer found and used my photo of the 8" Bernoulli cartridge.

These things are really hard to find nowadays! When they came out, most PCs did not even have a hard drive, and those that did typically only had a 5MB or 10MB unit. The Bernoulli cartridge stored 10MB (later 20MB) and you got two drives in a single enclosure! With the optional boot ROM installed on the host adapter card (an odd version SCSI that was closer to the predecessor, SASI) you could boot your OS off one drive and put data on the second disk. The biggest disadvantage was that it was slower than a regular hard drive.

it's based off the original Signetics design :)

thank you, this was a very interesting read!

yes, most likely this is the case. also for the ethernet phy. there's really no good reason for it; these pinouts are pretty bog standard. chalk it up to corporate paranoia.

yes, and in 2022, the company that bought their stock, Excess Solutions, also shut down. https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/1548349563936722944

these exist, they're called tramways but they are more common in europe.

great project! i ran into it the other day and was impressed with the number of wires.

i've been reverse engineering PCBs (mostly 2-4 layers) for a few years now and this is a part of the problem that i've been thinking about how to solve. best i can think of is a flying probe station cobbled together from 3d printers. basically you'd 1) scan the top and bottom of the board 2) generate a list of test points and pads 3) feed the coordinates into the flying probe system to generate the netlist

the other way to handle multilayer boards (and the most accurate, imo, because it captures exact ground plane designs, guard traces, and structures like that) is the scan-sand-scan approach. you'll get exact artwork--unfortunately the dust it generates is pretty nasty stuff.

This is the most useful comment in the thread (so far)!

This product would not work at all for any analog or power designs--EEs like to visualize current flow and a schematic is the best way to do that. Maybe if it could interoperate with small blocks of schematics, treating them as modules, it could be useful. If there was a way to parameterize part values, like those used to build analog filters, that could also be useful, but not in the current text-only form.

The one thing it could be useful for is creating net connectivity for large numbers of pin to pin connections, like DDR memory or PCIe buses. Schematics for these end up looking like large data tables anyway, and can be tedious to create and prone to errors.

I see so many EDA startups using their product for simple Arduino boards and other low to medium complexity designs. It's far more effective to start with the most complex board design. Take a server board from the OpenCompute project with a few thousands parts and a few tens of thousands of nets. What would that look like in this language? Would it have too much boilerplate code? What would the experience of creating it be like? How do you handle back annotation? How do you handle pin swaps, or part section swaps? How about BOM variants?

you will enjoy https://507movements.com/

a whole bunch of stuff over the years. one unusual find was an original Williams tube memory from an IBM computer. https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/1441865304427036675

don't forget that the 3rd edition has a separate volume titled The Art of Electronics: The X Chapters which includes some really fascinating material i've never seen anywhere else. a lot of practical design tips for working with real components along with some very advanced circuit designs. if you're already an EE, this volume is a great way to sharpen your skillset.

a more useful book for audio electronics is Handbook for Sound Engineers by Ballou. there are detailed discussions of common preamp circuits, equalizers, and that sort of thing.

for analog IC design, i highly recommend the excellent Designing Analog Chips[1] written by the person who designed the 555 timer. other books are more comprehensive and will give you all the theory, but this book is concise, practical, and free (at least for the pdf version).

[1] http://www.designinganalogchips.com/

that is why the word art is in the title. regardless, it gives you a good feel for how many engineers actually design stuff in the industry. the problem spaces aren't fully constrained, so you have to fill in the gaps with experience, guesswork, experimentation, and (yes) art.

nice work! i spent a lot of time learning to program using VB 1.0 for Windows (i could hardly wait and bought it as soon as it came out). it was so fast and lightweight compared with the alternatives. being able to call external DLL files was also quite useful.

and i still have the tube! at some point i should make a YouTube video about it.

yes, it is based on their reverse engineering work. i hand-copied every transistor from their netlist into a schematic and went from there.

at 50KHz, the LEDs mostly appear to be on, albeit at different brightness levels. but with the clock rate set much lower (say, below 50hz) it looks a lot more animated.

don't forget assembly costs. very few boards have such a large number of components, and they tend to be big and expensive server boards...

larger boards are also more difficult to work with in general. JLCPCB plays a few tricks to keep the costs down on the smaller boards, but once you go past certain limits, the price goes up significantly.

MOnSter 6502 creator here for any questions...

coauthor here: the book cover thing is a known issue that is turning out to be strangely difficult to solve. yes, the amazon cover is the older version.

we used a variety of tools: diamond saws, polishing wheels, hacksaws, and a lot of sandpaper.

many of the samples had to be mounted using clamps or dop wax.

most definitely!

very close, we made some minor fixes before going to press.

we had a good number of subjects that didn't make it into the book. some we were not able to section in a way that looked as good as the rest, and others were redundant or didn't quite fit with the theme.

yes, there is a "behind the scenes" chapter that goes into some of the methods we used, including photographic techniques.

co-author here, feel free to ask questions.

you should see my other project! https://monster6502.com/

The card has multiple names--it's a bit of an inside joke. The official name is the "Snark Barker."

The card has multiple names--it's a bit of an inside joke. The official name is the "Snark Barker."