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NOVA Rolm 1602 video

Q

Qbus

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Feb 23, 2011
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Salisbury Maryland
In a shameless effort to promote my latest video thought I would put a link up for it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMH4bGbC77w

Its of my Rolm 1602 that’s a military version of the Data General NOVA. First part is showing loading paper tape along with bootstrap and the second half is running the little program I put together for printing simple messages out the TT port. In the video it only shows four lines but the real program is around one hundred lines of code.
At first learning assembly for NOVA was frustrating, like trying to find your way around a room in the dark with a bag over your head. With lots of help I have at least approached the level of finding a light switch in that room, now just need to get the bag off my head.
Learned how to push things in and out of accumulators and I/O devices, JSR and JMP commands and the like, now if I can just figure out how to work beyond page zero I would be doing something.
 
I liked the video. The only thing I remember from attending the 'NOVA Maintenance class for users' in the mid 70's was that if a bulb in the tape reader goes out, you can substitute with a bulb used in the tail light of a VW Beatle.
 
The system in the video is a AN/UYK-19 1602B that was built in the early nineties by Loral under license.
I have an older 1602 that’s from the late seventies but that thing you have looks like maybe something that was produced for some special project. It appears to have the older CPU multicard set that would be the same as the regular 1602 and not the two card CPU set that the “B’ has.
The 1602 family was replaced by the 1666 family of products that were compatible with the later Data General Eclipse.
So, you don’t see a lot of this stuff but the regular 1602 and the 1666 are around but never saw anything like the 1602A you have.
 
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