Date   : Sat, 03 Jun 2006 10:51:48 +0100 (BST)
From   : Pete Turnbull <pete@...>
Subject: Re: Cheese Wedge Dating

On Jun 2 2006, 18:33, Jules Richardson wrote:

> Wonder about Prestel though? I can't remember if the board in that is
an Acorn
> design or an off-the-shelf modem board (as other manufacturers of the
time
> often used). If the latter then I imagine the Prestel adapter was a
really
> easy product to bring to market, so could well have beaten the
others...

The Prestel adaptor wasn't an off-the-shelf.  The hardware was an
in-house design and had some wierd restrictions placed on the interface
by Andy Hopper (as I recall) who insisted it had only the serial port
connection, which made control rather difficult.  It's actually done by
a state machine driven by pulses on the RTS line -- horrible!   The
only "standard" thing about it was the set of frequencies it used.

Anyway, as a result of that, and the need to move with the times --
remember this was the time of Micronet and the Gnome at Home -- it was
late being released.  The sideways ROM was actually written by
SoftMachinery and I remember going through the release version right
after it was released and finding a few bugs (I'd had earlier versions
of the SoftMachinery software for a long time and was peripherally
involved in beta testing), some introduced by Acorn's apparent meddling
with the code at random.

-- 
Pete                                           Peter Turnbull
                                               Network Manager
                                               University of York