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Regarding SOL-20s – A bit of history

Sadseagull

Member
Joined
Oct 13, 2016
Messages
26
Location
British Columbia and Casa Grande, AZ
I was involved with the SOL-20 from the very beginning as one of the first Processor Technology dealers. As a result, I have a few little historical tidbits that may be of interest.

  • The Black Walnut boards on the sides of the units were made from wood salvaged from wharves along the Mississippi River. The father of Terry, one of the main poohbahs at Proc Tech, was involved it removing old wharves along the river and supplied some of this wood to Terry for inclusion in the SOLs.
  • The Helios hard drive system that was sold as a SOL accessory was the most sensitive device on earth! It required an alignment process to operate. The alignment process required a very skilled technician with specialized equipment. I t had to be aligned where it was going to be used because, once aligned, if it got moved, even the slightest, it went out of alignment.
  • As most of you know, most of the SOLs sold came as kits. It was an interesting DIY project. I, personally, assembled more than a dozen. One batch of the main PC boards came with a very poor etching job and required the removal of lots and lots of very fine short circuits. What we finally did was use a car battery and probes to zap the offending etched to smoke.
  • The kit came with Texas Instruments IC sockets …. Great idea, but, as the computer heated and cooled over time, the ICs would work their way out of the sockets and flip upside down beside the socket as if dead. Stuff them back in and keep going!
  • Very few people know that one of the first, and very good, accounting programs was Accpac. The Accpac accounting system was written on SOLs in Vancouver BC. Accpac later evolved into some of the accounting systems being sold today.
 
Those TI sockets are not wonderful because the claws grab the IC pin from side to side rather than across the flat/thin axis of the pin. I have never seen an IC jump out off its socket with thermal cycling, that would be very interesting to see. Mechanical vibration & accelerational forces in shipping can work them loose too.
 
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