I’ve been compiling a consolidated advertiser index for the early years of BYTE magazine, thus far from V1N1 (September 1975) through V2N3 (March 1977). Hey, that’s one more thing to add to my Retrochallenge project!
This did turn up some Quay advertisements. There are two in V2N1 (January 1977). On page 84 there is a one column (1/3 page) ad for the Quay 80MPS single board computer, which is probably the immediate predecessor of the 90MPS board in my Quay 900 system. On page 98 there is one column an ad for the Quay 80AI board for S100 bus systems. The same two ads appear in V2N3 and V2N5. The 80AI ad appears by itself in V2N7. In V2N9 (September 1977) a full page ad includes the 80AI along with several new products including the 90MPS. It appears that they gave up on advertising in BYTE, because there aren’t any further Quay ads through V4N12 (December 1979). If anyone is aware of Quay advertisements in other periodicals, please let me know.
The Quay 80MPS is a large board with:
- 2.5 MHz Z80 CPU
- 4KiB of DRAM expandable to 16KiB
- eight 2708 EPROM sockets (including an on-board programmer!)
- two Z80 PIO chips for four 8-bit parallel I/O ports
- socket for a Z80 CTC
- console UART with RS-232 and 20 mA current loop interfaces.
The Quay 90MPS is similar, with:
- 4.0 MHz CPU option
- can use 16K DRAMs for up to 64KiB of RAM
- only seven 2708 EPROM sockets, and (apparently) no on-board programmer
They don’t mention the 90MPS having a floppy interface. The board pictured in the ad appears to be very similar to the later MPS90F board in the Quay 900, with the exception of not having a floppy disk controller.
Larry Fish turned up a copy of the 8080 I2L interpreter source code as well as the corresponding XPL0 compiler source code. The 8080 I2L interpreter was originally written by Wayne Wall, and enhanced and copyrighted by Dana Trout of Pickles & Trout. I only ever used XPL0 on the 6502 and 68K, though there were interpreters or native compilers for several other processors. It is based on XPL0 V4B, which predates floating point XPL0. It seems likely that there never was an 8080 floating point XPL0, though the I2L interpreter source code came along with source code for several different 8080 floating point packages. Anyhow, I’ll try to get permission from Wayne and Dana to release the code. So far the only email address I’ve found for Dana bounces.
I didn’t accomplish any Quay code hacking today, between work and going to a lacrosse game (the Denver Outlaws lost to the Boston Cannons). I’m not a huge fan, but a friend got free tickets, and it was followed by a great fireworks display.