Anita

This is Anita! I found her at a car boot sale and after some haggling and transfer of funds she was allowed to come home with me.

British made by the Bell Punch Company, the original model of Anita was the world's first all-electronic desktop calculator. Obviously this particular one is a slightly later model, released in 1971 - 10 years after the original.

Anita speaks in Reverse Polish when it comes to calculations, so my initial attempts at communicating with her resulted in some confusing exchanges. Luckily she came with the original instruction manual and I soon had her behaving properly. You must enter one number, press the ENTER 1ST NO button, enter the second number and then press the button for the operator (PLUS, MINUS etc).

The display is made up of 10 Nixie tubes. These are like vaccuum tubes; glass tubes filled with an inert gas. Each contains a wire mesh anode and 10 cathodes that light up to form the digits 0 to 9. The decimal point is represented by separate lamps, one between each digit, although sadly one of them doesn't light up any more. In fact, one of the other ones lights up instead, so it may be that the lamp works but there is a short circuit in there somewhere.

The LSI in the name stands for Large Scale Integration. Yes, this thing is old, but it actually contains integrated circuits! 1000s of transistors forming a miniaturised circuit in the surface of a thin layer of semiconductor material. I must admit I didn't know that integrated circuits were available in consumer products as early as 1971. When I first saw this thing, I was sure it must be late '70s.

Although Anita can count, unfortunately she is a bit poorly and has some trouble with her tubes. Displaying either a 4 or a 7 results in both the 4 and 7 cathodes lighting up simulateously, which makes understanding her answers slightly tricky! This affects each of the tubes, so I think it's a problem with the circuitry driving them rather than something wrong with the tubes themselves.

I don't know if Anita is worth much. There are certainly none on eBay, so she's a rare find that's for sure. I have a sneaky suspicion that her organs are worth more on the black market than she is as a whole. The Nixie tubes are quite sought-after by retro boffins who make them into clocks and other gubbins.

Project Amiga - Part 2

It turns out it's easy to get files from the PC file system to the emulated Amiga in WinUAE. There is a feature to create a virtual hard disk from a folder on the PC - perfect!

I've decided that I will need an easy way to move further files between the Amiga and PC in the future. Browsing eBay revealed a PCMCIA to Compact Flash solution that comes with the relevant software on an Amiga floppy. This is mightily tempting, but a) it's a bit of a cop-out to let someone else do the hard work and provide a ready-to-use disk and b) I am loathe to spend the £15.99 including shipping considering my whole set up so far has cost only £8.48!

Instead, I've ordered a PCMCIA to Compact Flash adapter from a seller in China for the whopping sum of £2.36 including delivery. How can they make any money selling this so cheaply?!!! I just hope that it's a classic 16-bit PCMCIA device and not 32-bit CardBus only.... My research leads me to believe that it is.


On the software front, I've downloaded a number of tools from Aminet that will hopefully get this thing working. Firstly the compact flash driver cfd.lha, which allows the Amiga to see the compact flash card. Secondly, FAT95, which allows the Amiga to read a Windows formatted file system. Finally, ADFBlitzer, which lets you write ADF files to real Amiga disks.

I also need to check out a tool called WHDLoad, which allows you to run many Amiga floppy games from the hard disk.

Project Amiga

Last weekend I had the good fortune to pick up a Commodore Amiga 1200 with Commodore 1084S colour monitor from a car boot sale for the princely sum of £5. The computer and monitor both worked well enough, so naturally the next thing to do was take the 1200 apart!

My plan was to install a 2.5" 1.2Gb laptop drive that I have lying around into the Amiga. This drive is no use to man nor beast when fitted to a PC nowadays, but in the Amiga 1.2Gb is plenty for a Workbench 3.0 install and a bunch of apps/games. The little metal cradle that the drive fits to was present inside, but not the 44-pin cable necessary to connect the drive to the Amiga's IDE interface, so it was onto eBay to buy one (£3.48).

While waiting for this to arrive I've been thinking about how to actually go about installing Workbench. When I had my original A1200, it was a hard disk model with a 20Mb(!) drive installed. Of course this had Workbench on it already, so I have no experience of actually installing it myself. I had used CrossDOS to get files between Amiga and PC on a 720Kb MS-DOS formatted disk, but this was before the days of emulation and ADF images so I have no experience of getting an ADF image from the PC to a real disk on the Amiga.

In readiness I've borrowed some Workbench disks from a friend who still has his A1200, however his is not a hard disk model and does not include the Install disk - just the 5 other disks (Workbench, Extras, Storage, Locale and Fonts). I read somewhere that the HDD tools are on the Extras disk, so I might be able to partition and format the drive in the Amiga using that. Then, to install Workbench it may be possible to simply copy the relevant files from the floppies to the right location on the HDD.

I then started reading about a feature in WinUAE that allows you to mount a real Amiga hard drive inside the emulator. As I have an IDE to USB adaptor for my PC, I can simply connect the 1.2Gb drive to the PC, mount it in WinUAE and install Workbench from there. Experimenting with WinUAE however revealed a problem - the "Add Hard Drive" button was greyed out. More reading and I found that WinUAE must be started with the -disableharddrivesafetycheck parameter, otherwise the emulator refuses to look at any drive that has an existing partition. I went to the command line and launched WinUAE with this parameter, but it made no difference. It turns out that you must also run WinUAE as administrator, so you need to be running your CLI as administrator or create a shortcut to WinUAE and right-click "Run as administrator".

The only thing I haven't figured out is how I will actually copy ADF images (or indeed any files) from my PC to the newly formatted Amiga hard drive. I will have to investigate how to get files from the PC's local file system to the attached Amiga HDD...