I recently acquired an Albert computer with dual disk drives and there are two small daughter boards that came loose in shipping. Does anyone have an Albert computer that could share a pic of their motherboard? Unfortunately, there is very little information on the net. Maybe someone here will know?
Anonymous
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Can you show us pictures of the Motherboard and cards?
Steven
Here is a pic if anyone is interested. (let's hope this works)
Sorry, haven't figured out how to post pics here. Here's what I got. The small and large daughter boards have been placed where I think they go. While they are in place with two identically numbered pins on each side of the daughter board, they both only fit one way (luckily). As you can see, I have the manual and the binder has additional notes. Unfortunately, neither talk about these two daughterboards or shows any pictures.
I did find an old auction for an Albert motherboard on eBay but it didn't have either daughterboard unfortunately.
Off topic: If someone can point me to a post telling me how to post pics, I would appreciate it.
Here are some pics. I made them smaller so they'll fit okay here. Hope they are good enough.
Oh that brings back memories.
I had an Albert at one point until I got a Iic back in the 80's. It could run off a battery, had a built in A/D converter. AppleSoft ROMs were not built in so you will need a disk with basic on it to boot from. A standard dos 3.3 disk works.
[edit] Mentioned this thread to my sister. She reminded me Dad gave me the Albert after about a month of playing around with it, then I had it until my IIc, which I only got because she got a brand new Macintosh and I complained that I wanted a new computer too. Good thing dad liked an excuse for gadgets...
Dear snuci,
here's another Thread but also not much information
http://www.applefritter.com/content/albert-computers
and another one I just found
https://classictech.wordpress.com/computer-companies/albert-computers-inc-thousand-oaks-ca/
Have fun...
Thanks for the replies guys. I am a little surprised that there is not the slightest bit more info out there for the Albert computer. Corey, I'm surprised you haven;'t seen any in your travels. I guess you don't see many Apple clones.
I think I'll have to take a chance and just try it but I won't be able to do that until later tomorrow. It also came with a pile of diskettes. I'm assuming a proper boot disk is in that pile. There is a bunch of Apple II games so compatibility must have been pretty good. I also have a couple of extra chips that came with the package that may have been upgraded proms.
While the manual states that there should be a separate power supply, I didn't find one. It looks like the same plug is coming out of the dual floppy unit. The floppy unit has a built in power supply so it must feed the base unit. I tried to contact the original owner but they haven't used it in so long that they no longer remember how it connect.
We'll have to see how that works. I do plan to take some additional pics and put it on my website. Fingers crossed that it's fine.
I fired up the Albert and it shows "Apple ][" centered on the top. If I hit the spacebar, it attempts to load from drive A. If I hit the button on the front of the computer, I get a "]" prompt. Sadly, the keyboard is a little messed up. I have to hit keys multiple times before they register yet they are mechanical SMK switches. The keyboard has an encoder daughterboard that I can't remove because the keyboard mechanism is in a metal case and it's somehow manfactured around the keyboard mechanism because the bottom opening is too small to remove the internals. Very odd.
I don't have a Taxan RGB monitor (manual indicated the pinouts for it) so I had to use composite. Sadly, this is in black and white.
Here are some more pics:
http://vintagecomputer.ca/albert-computer/