Ah, Digicom. That brings back memories... Yes, Tom, a packet
controller.
Digicom was an amazing program written by a group of German hams.
It turned a Commodore 64 into a packet controller, with the help of a
hardware interface to generate the tones. In the mid 80's, I wrote an
article about it that appeared in 73 Magazine, and later, the Spanish
edition of CQ. It was the forerunner to Baycom, the PC version of the
software.
With design help from Willy, YV1AQE, and the PC board production
facilities of A&A Engineering in Anaheim, resulted the board you are
looking at. You loaded the software on disk (or later, a cartridge version
I developed) and plugged the interface into the C64 cassette port, and
voila, your C64 became a full-function TNC, with some amazingly
advanced features for the time, such as multiple streams and remote
control of other Digicom equipped C64s and their output ports.
I still have a C64, Digicom cartridge and interface here for nostalgia's
sake, but I haven't plugged it in for quite a few years.
73,
Barry W2UP
On 15 Sep 2002 Tom Osborne wrote:
>
>
> Well, had an interesting thing happen yesterday. I went to a
> garage sale and found a bunch of stuff-connectors, coax jumpers,
> plugs, and an interesting little "black box." Brought the
> treasures home and today I took the black box apart and lo and
> behold, on the bottom of the circuit board was written "Barry
> Kutner W2UP." What the heck is that Barry, a packet controller?
> No doc's came with it. 73
> Tom W7WHY
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--
Barry Kutner, W2UP Internet: w2up@mindspring.com
Newtown, PA Frankford Radio Club
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