Introduction
Well, you are really into the deep water now! This part of my home
page is devoted to the Convergent Technologies Miniframe. A little
known, but interesting piece of computer hardware. These machines
were manufactured back in the 1980's by Convergent Technologies and
later was modified to become what is fondly known at the ATT 3b1 or
7300. The machines have an incredible amount in common.
Here is a thumbnail sketch of the miniframe hardware complement.
- MC68010 cpu, running at 10Mhz.
- Supports 2 MFM hard drives.
- Supports a single floppy drive.
- 512kb on the main board.
- A bizarre "expansion bus" that could allow up to
2M of memory, QIC tape, extra serial ports, even ethernet(?).
- 2 serial ports (RS232).
- Parallel port.
- RS-422 synchronous serial port (2Mbits per second).
I acquired two of these back in the late 1980's when I had no other
computers to fool around with at home (unless you call a Z80 S100
system a computer :-) ), and lavished quite a bit of attention on them.
Now they are clearly obsolete, but still interesting to fiddle with ....
perhaps.
To further tickle your interest, ponder these;
(these are a bit large, so click with forethought).
At some point, and if anyone exhibits any interest,
I can put up the full set of my sources for anonymous ftp.