KFKI TPA Quadro
The "professional personal computer" of the mid-eighties,
also called "sewing machine" because of its shape. The Quadro
is somewhat similar to Digital's DECmate series, but it has a real system
expansion bus, which is compatible with those of the TPA-8 series (TPA/i,
TPA/s, TPA/l, TPA-l/128H).
Configuration:
- NR4024 processor unit:
Am2900 bitslice CPU, with 12-bit wordlength, instruction set: expanded
PDP-8
tipical cycle time: 1-5 usec/intruction
- Memory:
128Kword
- Expansion:
2 asynchronous (V.24) and 1 synchronous (V.24, X.21) serial interfaces,
2 parallel printer ports, with one beeing the console hardcopy,
the interface cards of the various TPA8 machines can be used (the SYSTEM UNIT
has space for six 3/3-sized cards, the CPU and basic interfaces occupy
four of them)
- Mass storage:
the basic configuration has 5.25" floppy drive units, this
can be expanded with two more floppy drives, or with a winchester drive
(20MB MFM)
- Console subsystem:
VT52/VT100-compatible, it uses the built-in CRT
Mechanical construction:
- plastic enclosure
- 300W switching power supply for 220V/50Hz
- keyboard
- 12"-es monohrome CRT
- Acoustic and visual sign:
speaker (key click, bell)
console lights: online, local, locked, l1-l4
(for selftests)
An interesting option was the Z80-based card that enabled the usage
of CP/M. Otherwise, the machine run the OS/L, COS/H or RTS/H operating
systems.
