Hi all,
I have 3 projects related to Aussie gear that are running at the moment that are ACMS adjacent. These are:
Would anyone be interested in updates on these projects or being involved? Maybe we could do videos on these?
Also it’d be good to get more projects like this going with Aussie stuff. E.g. the Hartley gear.
Riley. Where are you doing these restorations?
One in Melbourne (Microtec) and the other two in Sydney at separate locations.
I’d be interested in the Fairlight restoration
Cool - it is in a studio just 5 mins from the ACMS. I was at Fairlight founder Peter Vogel’s house today actually! Amazing chap. The Fairlight powers on and the cards seem to work. Next step is to get some software I think?
@R_Freeman - I think the first problem to be solved is getting a SCSI drive we can use with the Fairlight. It’s a CMI III/Mfx. I’m not sure of the specifics.
Hi I would be interested in helping with the Hartley restorations. It would have to be virtual as I am based in Brisbane. I used to work in the factory on final test and repair. I don’t have any of the Hartley board circuits except in my memory but have circuits for the keyboards, monitors and information on the hard drives and the Xebec SASI card used to run the hard drives. Unfortunately, the operating system (RT86) ran out of dates about 15 years ago, so they are no longer usable as a real system. (16 bit signed integer) However at least one accountant was still using them and hurriedly had to change systems when they stopped working. I am also still in touch with some of the engineers and some of the designers.
G’day Duncan and welcome to the ACMS forum. We’re always very glad to hear from people with first-hand knowledge and experience with Australian computers. I searched in the ACMS online catalogue for Hartley (https://hub.catalogit.app/7049/search/hartley) and there are a couple of examples (3901 & 3904) in the collection.
I also did a Google search for “Hartley Computers” and again there’s a little bit of history out there but I didn’t see any technical docs that would help restore or operate the systems. Do you guys have any of that?
If you’d like to share some of your experience, I recommend creating a new forum post for Hartley Computers and own it: post anything and everything you can remember, upload photos, documents (eg pdf manuals) and invite your former colleagues to join you there and share their experiences too.
Cheers, Josh
Hi Duncan,
Excellent. I’ve had a long email from David Hartley sitting in my inbox for a while. He’s not in a great way. Now I can give him some goss. We REALLY would love a copy of RT86! Also literally anything else related to Hartley Computers is gold. Email me? riley.perry@acms.org.au
David doesn’t even have a copy of RT86 btw.
I also have a separate Hartley machine to restore. HAPAS and SHEILA would be amazing to get hold of. Do you know of the location of any source code?