I've recently been sorting through some old floppies from my father, and found some interesting stuff on one of them. In the late '80s to late 90's my father worked for a UK PC manufacturer where he did the occasional bit of PCB design with CAD software. A couple of these disks are copies of the CAD software he was using at the time, and happen to also contain some of the designs that the company produced in that period. I'm not sure if my dad did all of them, but I sure remember him working on a PC 386 motherboard, which is amongst the design files.
Some of these PCB designs are A3000 add-ons:
I've figured out how to run the MS-DOS CAD software in an emulator and export Gerber files from it (albeit in an older format that I can convert to the modern standard), so I'm wondering if there might be any interest in me publishing these files to the community. Whether it may be of any use to people who want to repair or recreate any of this stuff. However, it should be noted I have no schematics or netlists - only PCB layouts - nor any component part numbers, values, or a bill of materials, so it all might be of limited usefulness.
I'm a bit hesitant to just put this stuff out there as-is because the PCBs are branded with the company's name and logo, and as far as I can tell the company still exists in some form (albeit seemingly a shadow of its former self), and I wouldn't want to get in any trouble. I could possibly edit the Gerbers to remove the names and logos.
Interested to know what people think.
Some of these PCB designs are A3000 add-ons:
- ACORN A3000 WINCHESTER PODULE
- A3000 & ARCHIMEDES EXTERNAL FLOPPY DRIVES INTERFACE MODULE (two versions: original and "rev 1")
- A3000 1 MBYTE MEMORY EXPANSION MODULE
- A3000 3 MBYTE MEMORY EXPANSION MODULE
- A3000 2 OR 4 MBYTES MEMORY EXPANSION MODULE
- A3000 3 MBYTE MEMORY EXPANSION BOARD (another; not sure how this differs to the previous)
I've figured out how to run the MS-DOS CAD software in an emulator and export Gerber files from it (albeit in an older format that I can convert to the modern standard), so I'm wondering if there might be any interest in me publishing these files to the community. Whether it may be of any use to people who want to repair or recreate any of this stuff. However, it should be noted I have no schematics or netlists - only PCB layouts - nor any component part numbers, values, or a bill of materials, so it all might be of limited usefulness.
I'm a bit hesitant to just put this stuff out there as-is because the PCBs are branded with the company's name and logo, and as far as I can tell the company still exists in some form (albeit seemingly a shadow of its former self), and I wouldn't want to get in any trouble. I could possibly edit the Gerbers to remove the names and logos.
Interested to know what people think.
