Will this run a CNC

.

Thinking of buying this to run a CNC milling machine.

Will it be OK as it looks a bargain.

Oh how the world has changed. - And presumably some people did actually buy them.?

Nick

I remember how advanced the PDP11 was at work in 1977 that had twin cassette tape drives to load the operating system after you had put the binary bootstrap program in on the switches. It ran the automated testing of the multistage transistor amplifiers on the MARECS satellite - the first satellite not to use valves. Over lunch we programmed it to play Star Trek. The 6800 I was building in the evenings had 256 bytes of RAM.

Well Nick, I used CP/M systems at work ages ago, they were state of the art back then. I guess 64K RAM wouldn't be of much use for todays GUI systems.

Thor

PDP11! That's modern crap. Back around 1980 I was making punched tapes for a Marconi Elliot 18bit computer used on British Railway's Healey Mills Train Describer. To make it fun I was writing machine code to do this on an HP 16bit ferrite core memory mini-computer. And then the Union Official complained about the punched tape drive's noise in the office keeping their members awake after lunch and I was promptly shut down.

That's one of the reasons I ended up in the Oil Field.

CP/M!

People who complain about Windows should be forced to use it...

Neil

My Roland CAMM-3 CNC's just fine with it's 4MHz Z80.

The company I worked for were first to offer a 10MB drive for under a thousand pounds. The disks were fine it was the interface card trying to run on that IBM edge triggered interrupt. Remember that IBM edge triggered interrupt?

The first computer I bought using someone else's money was a Casu Super C. British made, the CPU was a 2MHz Z80. It had a pair of 8" floppy disks (I think 128kB each) , a 10Mb fixed hard-drive, and a 10Mb exchangable hard-drive. The latter was a cartridge the size of large pizza box. (This was before pizza was sold in the UK - we had to eat coal.) Long before Microsoft and Apple got there, the machine supported two users. The operating system was MP/M and it switched between two banks of 64kb RAM to create the illusion of two CP/M computers.

Two things were of interest:

• The machine cost about the same as a 3-bedroomed semi-detached house in SE England; £15000.
• The computer was much visited by my seniors, 'old chaps', 40+ years of age, experts in mainframe computing. They explained at great length why such computers would never catch on. The main reason was that a cheap computer could not possibly deliver quality. How wrong they were!

Dave

Got a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in working order, and an old Toshiba Satilite lap top with W 95 on it, this computer is said to have cost $NZ 5000 when bought new, it was the NZ Heart Foundations first computer, and I got it after the Foundations building was flattened in the Christchurch earthquake. The Sinclair cost $NZ 5 at a garage sale, I'v got some info somewhere to use it on a CNC lathe or mill.

Ian S C

There are references on the web to a chap who programmed some CNC routines to do work on an Amiga computer, using the AMOS Pro language.

Ed. (Amiga fan and user).