Ethan's Retrocomputing Corner - SBC6120
I got my first PDP-8 in 1982 - a PDP-8/L from the
Dayton Hamvention
for $35 and a couple of swap items. Twenty years later,
when Bob Armstrong made SBC-6120 boards available for
under $100, there was no question - of course I had to build
one. I'm also in the process of building an
IOB6120
to give it some extra I/O capabilities (including an entire
VT52 embedded in the FPGA), and an
FP6120
for lights and switches (pictures of those to follow)
Pictures
The bare SBC6120, as mounted in an Amiga external 3.5" disk enclosure.
It's almost entirely unmodified (I did have to remove some plastic from the
bottom that formerly supported the disk mechanism). Note the convenient
square hole at the back of the enclosure - normally, that's filled with
a DB-19 for daisy-chaining the drives together. It's at the perfect spot
for viewing the status LEDs and accessing the reset button.
SBC-6120 with the RAMdisk (closeup shows details of the odd hybrid SRAMs
I found in a junk drawer - four smaller SRAMs on a ceramic carrier with
a logic IC embedded in the middle for chip select).
SBC-6120 with a CompactFlash adapter mounted on a simple perf-board
carrier. This particular CF module is "8MB" (8,000,000 bytes,
really), so there's only room for two partitions, but that's enough to
play around.
The two small holes in the perf board over the serial jack were
going to be for an RJ-45 connector. My intention was to rig up
an internal serial connector compatible with Cisco's RS-232 plugs,
but it was quicker to externally mount a PC serial dongle and pass
the cable through the former disk drive cable hole.
Links
- Spare Time Gizmos
- Bob Armstrong's site for the
SBC-6120
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Last modified:
02 October 2003
© Copyright 2003, Ethan Dicks
<erd@infinet.com>.
All Rights Reserved.