Renseignements généraux

Nº de série

8210003

Nº de partie

1

Nombre total de parties

1

Ou

S/O

Brevets

S/O

Description générale

Metal casing sides and back and parts/ Synthetic casing front, tape drive portal, controls and parts

Dimensions

Remarque : Cette information reflète la taille générale pour l’entreposage et ne représente pas nécessairement les véritables dimensions de l’objet.

Longueur

47,0 cm

Largeur

43,5 cm

Hauteur

29,5 cm

Épaisseur

S/O

Poids

S/O

Diamètre

S/O

Volume

S/O

Lexique

Groupe

Technologie informatique

Catégorie

Dispositifs numériques

Sous-catégorie

S/O

Fabricant

Ou

DY4

Pays

Canada

État/province

Ontario

Ville

Ottawa

Contexte

Pays

Canada

État/province

Ontario

Période

early 1980s +

Canada

A computing device made by a Canadian company. DY-4 Systems was founded in Ottawa in 1978 with about 50 staff and this was the first microcomputer that they designed and built. They had started making passive / nonprogrammable terminals and graphics terminals. Like virtually every computer company of the day, they quickly adopted IC technology to make small, affordable computers for business and scientific work. DY-4 were using clusters of ¾ of these machines for engineering when Andy Fraser joined the firm in 1982. At that time they had 95 employees growing to 300 now. In November 2000, DY-4 was bought by CMAC of Montreal, which was in turn bought in November 2001 by the French firm Celectron. Their primary products are now V-MOS cards used in military vehicles like tanks, torpedoes, etc. The successor version to this Orion came out in 1982 and was based on Motorola's 68000 chip rather than the Z80 chip used in this model. The flood of machines aimed at similar target markets in this period drove many companies out of business, or like DY-4 Systems, into different but related equipment. DY-4 now makes equipment for the military. When this machine was built, DY-4 was at Lady Ellen Place and had a staff of approximately 50. Carleton University had a large installation of DY-4 machines though the donor was not certain if it was this model or the successor model.

Fonction

A programmable machine that accepts and processes data. It contains a microprocessor and is used by individual for personal or business computing purposes.

Technique

An early microcomputer with an 8 inch floppy drive and internal hard drive (made by Rodime Ltd. in Scotland, model RO200 (20 MB), serial no. 24008970) and outputs to printer and consol, and with 5 auxiliary ports. Some are not connected to their driver cards as delivered but still probably are working. The device has 2 fans (made by Torin, model Alpha V TA450S) indicating the amount of heat generated by the motherboard and various driver cards. The power supply was reportedly large tp provide the capacity required. This model was DY-4's first complete computer and was based on the Z80 microprocessor chip technology and protocols. It came with 48 KB of RAM (expandable to 56 KB), had 2 KB EPROM (expandable to 6 KB or 4 KB of RAM). The boards for the memory and parallel I/O, Serial/Parallel I/O. dynamic RAM card and floppy disc controller (plus two spare slots) are held in a cage system popular at the time. The Orion came ready to run but also allowed users to modify the OS (CP/M 2) and for debugging. Compilers were available for such common programmes as FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, PASCAL and LISP. Two of the serial ports were configured for 1200 and 9600 baud modems and could be modified with jumpers to go to 19.6 baud.

Notes sur la région

Inconnu

Détails

Marques

Blue lettering on front reads 'ORION/ dy4/ dy-4 Systems Inc.'/ Blue and gold label on back reads 'dy4 [logo] dy-4 SYSTEMS INC. CANADA/ Model No. ORION 6B/ Serial No. 8210003/ Voltage 230V 50Hx/ Fuse S.B. 3 AMP'/ Black lettering for control functions on back

Manque

Appears complete. One foot is detached.

Fini

Textured beige painted casing back and sides/ Dark brown painted bar on each casing side/ Dark brown casing front with red and black controls/ Black controls on back

Décoration

S/O