The Jim Austin Computer Collection
NASCOM 2
One of the first UK home computers. It was made to be built at
home.
This one was given to the
collection in Oct 2004.
He notes:
"There are 2 Nascom 2 boards, both of which
worked when last tried (about 15 yrs ago!). The one that has the
top missing from the UHF modulator only works at 2Mhz, I could never find out
why. The other one has had one of the dil switches replaced by wires to
a 2-way switch, to make the RS232 (or maybe the cassette interface, or both)
run at 1200 or 300 baud. Which is which is scratched on the side of the
switch. The modulators on both boards have had a through wire
inserted to make video instead of UHF come out of the socket. I
think that's all the mods on the main boards.
The AVC card has an extra piggy-back board added
as part of a brilliant idea I once had for speeding it up. Alas, I never
finished it. It should be not-too-difficult to unmodify - the extra
board can be easily removed, but what will be a little fiddly will be
repairing the breaks I made in some of the tracks on the underside.
There's some miniature co-ax plugs that fit the outputs of the board in the
tobacco tin.
The missing keytop on the keyboard just had the
word 'Reset' on it. (The keyboard was one one the Nascom's very plus
features - no switch-bounce because the Licon keys are contactless - each key
has a couple of loops of wire that act as a transformer when a sense signal is
sent through one loop on each key. Depressing the key puts a little
magnet near the loops, saturating the 'transformer' and stopping it from
working. Detecting which key(s) don't have an output tells you which
ones are pressed. Nice and clever and elegant and effective.)"
It might be quite rare to find a machine with all
the cards this one has. It also has just about all
the manuals.
Two processor cards:
A Nascom keyboard
48K 4MHz Dynamic RAM card (issue 3) Nascom
Video card, AVC, model B Nascom
I.V.C card. Light pen and sound.
Nascom i/o card
Another memory card, Gemini.
The rack.
and its power supply.