Looking for info on some Olympia CP/M machines - ETX I, ETX II & EX 100

[olyguy]

Typewriter for ETC II

Typewriter for ETC II

Hello Robert,
its an old thread, but to my knowledge the ETX II was sold with the Olympia Professional Typewriter and a version of Wordstar. Maybe this helps you. Do you know if there is an PDF version of the manual?

Best regards from Wilhelmshaven

Udo

The ETX II ha two switches on the front: one marked 1 and 0, presumably power and one marked M and P. The EX 100 has a switch marked Type and WP, so that may also be what the second switch on the ETX II does.

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Stickers:

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By way of ports, we have two 25 pin dsubs and a BNC, presumably for video.

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Off comes the top:

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And we can see part of the main board, with a couple of Z80 PIOs, from Mostek:

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To see the rest, I had to remove the floppy drives:

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Also exposing a smaller board, connected via a 50 way ribbon cable.

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The drives are by TEAC:

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And putting them back was a nightmare of lining up tab A with slot B, but I got it done.

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That's all for now. I'm going to wait for the manuals to arrive, before taking a look at the EX 100.

 

[Mr.megacham]

According to this ad, it should turn any typewriter with the interface into a word processor. Here's Olympia ETX 1's ad as a bonus.

 

[Marsbar]

Hello!

This week, I scored four Olympia boxes - an ETX I, an ETX II and two EX 100s.

Googling has not been very fruitful. I have established that the ETX II and the EX 100 are CP/M machines, SSDD 48 tpi 5.25" and DSDD 48 tpi 5.25" respectively and have seen one assertion that the ETX II is S-100 based - I won't be able to confirm that until I open it up. I found nothing on the ETX I.

As best I can figure out, these were sold as add ons for electric typewriters. You hooked them up, with they typewriter acting as keyboard and printer and you had a word processor or computer.

I think I have one interface board, that came in a box with the EX I.

Does anybody know anything about these machines? It seems like a boot disk from an Osborne One would work.

Most immediately, though, does anybody know which typewriters they worked with? I have an opportunity to go back to where I got them, today and it would be great if I didn't have to haul off every damn typewriter with "Olympia" on it!

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Edited to add: The ETX I doesn't seem to have a floppy drive, so may not be a CP/M box. I guess I'll have to power it on and see if it gives me a clue as to what's in the firmware.

Did you ever find out more about which typewriter the ex100 can interface with or the CP/M disks? Let me know. I just brought one back to life and am keen to know more!