One of the first available 16-bit microcomputers was the PSE Pacer, introduced in 1976. (NOT the contemporaneous AMC Pacer, though I knew someone who had one). My Retrochallenge project is to restore and reverse-engineer the Pacer, and time permitting, write some programs for it and/or build a higher-capacity memory board.
Project Support Engineering of Sunnyvale California sold the PACER in either kit or assembled form. It was one of the first 16-bit microcomputers, based on the National Semiconductor PACE 16-bit microprocessor. The PACER offered a calculator-style hexadecimal keyboard, and two four-character LED displays.
The entry-level PACER has:
- unregulated linear power supply
- motherboard supporting up to 11 card slots, with only 3 edge connectors installed (but note that the power supply is not beefy enough to support more than a few additional cards)
- PACE CPU card
- user memory card
- 256 16-bit words (512 bytes) of static RAM, using four 2112 NMOS 256×4 static RAM chips
- optional expansion to 1024 16-bit words of static RAM
- optional expansion to
- front panel interface card with monitor firmware (2048 16-bit words of ROM) and 256 16-bit words of monitor scratchpad RAM
- front panel board with keyboard encoder and LED display drivers
There were several optional PACER boards, including a teletype interface.
There is a brief review of the PACER in National Semiconductor’s Compute Volume 2 Number 8.
I received the PACER without any documentation, and searches have turned up no documentation, hence my need to do some reverse-engineering.
I will put photos of the PACER in a flickr album.