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The Nibbler computer

Any indication of the age in the documentation or on the boards? Digi-Key is still in business. Have you tried contacting them?
 
It uses the SC/MP microprocessor, as used in the Science of Cambridge MK14 microcomputer, my first computer, I sold my three MK14s plus extras, about 30 years ago for £20 all in, now one MK14 fetches over £600 on ebay, I have now bought an SC/MP microprocessor to build a microcomputer with it since I can never afford an MK14 again :D

I would be interested in hearing what you eventually do with it, and if you can get a cheap shipping price to the UK, I might be interested in buying it.
 
The only dates I can find in the book are 1976. Lots of references to the dobs journal.
 
Any indication of the age in the documentation or on the boards? Digi-Key is still in business. Have you tried contacting them?

No I have not, but I did search their site finding nothing. Don't figure there would be many people left there that would even know what it was.

Robert
 
The SC/MP seems to have been more popular in the UK than in the US. For example, Kilobaud #1 mentions only three CPUs--8080, 6800 and 6502. I remember looking at the datahseet for the SC/MP and shaking my head--awkward addressing (16 pages of 4K a la PDP-8 ) with very slow (multi-cycle) instructions.

The other problem that dogged National was the world trying to figure out what the heck they were trying to do. This was probably Charlie Sporck's fault. NSC started with the IMP-16 multi-chip microprocessor, followed by the SC/MP, followed shortly by the PACE, which hailed back to the IMP-16. At the same time, they were aggressively second-sourcing Intel's 8080. I suspect they spent more money on developing the 8080 development system (NSC Starplex) that they did on the entire SC/MP program. Then they were second-sourcing the 8086, then trying to sell their NS32K chips (a great design, but they let Motorola and Intel grab the market, all the while telling prospective customers "Real Soon Now" and then following that with buggy silicon). Somewhere in there, they were peddling the NSC800 -- a Z80 in 8085's clothing.

I think any engineer worth his salt would have no qualms about using NSC's linear products--they were legendary. But National never did seem to get the gist of what the digital world was about.
 
Yes it is slow and I think I like it simply because it was used in my first computer, it was however a popular micro with the electronics magazines who published at least 3 computer designs using it, there were also at least 5 commercial computer designs up to 1980ish.
I believe it was slow because it used a serial ALU, the 12 bit address bus was excusable because memory was expensive and it allowed some I/O pins on the processor itself, but the most interesting feature of the chip is that it was designed for multi-processing, allowing several processors to share the same memory bus without additional hardware, here the 12 bit memory address range with wraparound meant that several programs could run in their own separate pages without corrupting each others memory space.
 
Well, there's a lot of stuff to get around to. I still have a GI CP1600 sitting in my parts drawer that I need to eventually get around to... :)
 
This is sounding a lil to old for me to know anything about. Maybe I should pass it on. What would a fair price be?
 
This is awesome. My grandpa had a Nibbler long ago. He didn't have the chassis, it was just a couple boards underneath a homebrew keyboard, and possibly attached to a TV Typewriter. Unfortunately, it was thrown away after he died, so it's long been my goal to find or build a new Nibbler and TV Typewriter.

Back in 2006, I sent an email to Digi-Key to see if anyone there knew anything about the Nibbler. They were only able to dig up some documentation on a memory expansion board, but they sent it along to me and I posted it as a PDF: http://afiler.com/nibbler_mem_board.pdf
 
Well I would be glad to pass it on but, I don't know the value of this. Could anyone chime in on this? I've never seen another, let alone the book. Might be the last one out there.

Robert
 
I don't know, Robert. National did have a devkit of its own for the SC/MP (as did most MPU manfuacturers), so any collector of this type of thing is going to be rather specialized.

In this same category, I guess I'd classify the Jolt computer. Uncommon, but unknown valuation.
 
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