The Ware for August 2025 is shown below.
Thanks to Curtis Galloway for contributing this bit of nostalgia! This board has the look of one that was laid out by hand using masking tape or rubylith – back in the day before computers became affordable and powerful enough to regularly use them for making new computers. It also looks hand-soldered, instead of wave-soldered. I only ever designed a couple of boards using tape, but even today I’m still hand-soldering boards – BGAs, 0201’s and all. I do a lot less of it than I used to, but you still gotta fix bugs and hack things the old fashioned way.
It is UK101 computer. Nice piece of computing history.
I think this is the Ohio Scientific Superboard II. The reason is the notch in the corner of the PCB, and the blurred name above the keyboard.
Definitely an OSI 600 Superboard II
I’m not so sure – the OSI docs I see says it has 4K or 8K. I only see 2K on this board. But if it’s not that, it’s something similar.
Those are 2114 chips, 4k x 1 bit DRAM. So if only one row of 8 is filled you have 4kB.
I bought a 4kB one (the Superboard II). I eventually bought 8 more 2114s (probably from an add in Byte) and upgraded.
I used an old desk calculator (nixie tube, programmable) case for the case, and made a power supply with a transformer, diodes, capacitors and a 7805. The Challenger 1P was the version that already had a case and power supply, but who could afford that?
24 lines of 24 characters OR 12 (16?) lines of 48 characters, if I recall correctly. I think the alternative resolution was something added in version 2 of the board. The numbers aren’t 2^n because those character locations correspond to overscan and retrace/flyback time
Schematics on pg 50 show the memories
https://archive.org/details/superboard-ii-c-1-p-users-manual/page/n49/mode/2up
https://www.vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread_record.cfm?id=405&tid=3
I was wrong in my (awaiting moderation) post. The 2114 is a 1k x 4 bit static ram.
The OSI Superboard II came with 8 or 16 of them (as main memory) for 4kB or 8kB. On the 4kB version the empty 8 slots had the sockets soldered in so it was just a matter of buying the DIPs and plugging them in for an upgrade.
https://www.circuits-diy.com/2114-1kx4-200ns-low-power-ram-datasheet/#google_vignette
Looks like a Ohio Scientific Superboard II lower board to me, like people said yesterday.
There’s an interesting reproduction project going on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0_-hZpu81Y
Love all of the hacky bodge wires, someone clearly loved this machine — or at least, loved trying to improve it. Maybe it’s been modified to add additional RAM? I can’t really tell.
Your comment made me look at the wires in detail. The color of some wires could be a hint that a twisted-pair ethernet cable was re-purposed in the process. Which is funny, because we can not only try to pinpoint the date of the original ware (final factory test on JUN 22 of ’79), but we can also ask if the modification was done after 10-base-T became available and people had excessive lengths of its physical layer in their junk piles for quick hacks (starting in the early 1990s?).
Doubt regarding this theory are OK; the “orange” stripe could be less yellow on that one wire and no wire with a white/brown coating is evidenced in the picture).
Maybe someone wants to check when the E-file number on the big red litz was first registered at UL (E20049)?