The Sinclair QL Forum

Pr0f wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2023 8:47 am It does make you wonder where all this old hardware ended up - someone must have a bit of it stashed away somewhere

Unfortunately it is probably in recycling/landfill as house clearance companies only resell the easy stuff!

Very likely this is the case - and the original equipment producers rarely want to give you any information - although Zilog did find me a very old tech article for one of their boards for the EZ80 - so some of them keep good archives.

I am surprised ICL don't have more info stashed away...

Pr0f wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 12:23 pm I am surprised ICL don't have more info stashed away...

ICL don't exist any more. First STC bought them and then sold the rump they hadn't ruined to Fujitsu decades ago.

It was Fujitsu I approached for information on the ICL OPD about 3 years ago, as one of my colleagues used to work for ICL many moons ago and gave me a contact there - but they don't keep archives of anything older than a few years - it seems not many companies do this anymore - so there is a wealth of lost information that will probably never be recovered now.

There used to be a scan of the "OPD Advanced User Guide" at http://classic-micros.com/iclopd/advancedops/index.html years ago, but it is like a Norwegian Blue Parrot, no more!

I have searched but no joy on finding anything relevant, other than dead links. Even archive.org is lacking in anything. I wish I'd kept the docs I got from ICL when I was a mainframe Tech Support "guru", back in the day.


Cheers,
Norm.

I made up a board...


It's a bit tall...


Promisingly the system sees the card and gives the BAD CAPSULE error, as it should if there's an invalid (or non-existant) ROM.


As suspected, the clock circuit just doesn't work. So, I'm going to have to hack together one based upon one of the reference circuits I can find on-line.

Actually, I'll just buy a crystal oscillator can and use that.

I see Ebay have got 6 x ICL OPD books if that helps?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/305321860448

Thanks.
Unfortunately they're just user guides and not the technical documentation, which was classed as a company secret by ICL, so only a poorly scanned copy with pages missing exists,

stephen_usher wrote: ↑Fri Dec 22, 2023 4:25 pm Thanks.
Unfortunately they're just user guides and not the technical documentation, which was classed as a company secret by ICL, so only a poorly scanned copy with pages missing exists,

Have you looked at the field notes etc on https://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk/oneperde ... _info.html