Personality Module SOL-20 - is this right?

[billdeg]

Anyone have a SOL-20 and if so, note the edge connectors of your SOLOS personality module. See how these above have two scraped off leads? Is this something one does on purpose and if so why?

When I check the power the 5V is consistently 4.7 volts, not 5. The power supply seems ok, so something on the board is shorting. Not sure yet what. I have a few other projects ahead in line, but I thought I'd get some opinions.

Bill

 

[linuxlove]

on a new question (never bothered to ask before), what does a SOL-20 Personality Modual do?

 

[chuckcmagee]

Nope, the one I found of mine that has the Solaris rom on it has all 15 connections intact, just as we all would expect. 15 others on the other side of the board too. Part number on the board is the same as yours.

 

[PacMan]

Jepp, mine is also intact, and working.

/P

 

[vbriel]

Bill,

I'd have to pull mine out and see but that appears to be scrapped off. The leads look like they go to power and the orange cap to the connectors is for decoupling noise from the power.

Vince

 

[billdeg]

that's what I was thinking. wonder why the original owner did that? I still need to find the short (s) on the board anyway.

For those interested...The personality module (SOLOS) is a monitor program built into the SOL-20 and it came with the SOL-20. The module itself is a little controller card that is inserted into a special slot above the main motherboard.

http://vintagecomputer.net/processor_tech/sol-20/

When you turn on a SOL you get the > prompt courtesy of SOLOS. CUTTER is the name of the SOLOS monitor made for other computers. I have CUTTER running on my IMSAI. It's the same thing, only minor differences.


Here is a thread with current repair details from my web site. I have only just started and probably will not spent too much time on this until after VCF East.
http://vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread.cfm?id=254

 

[Ole Juul]

on a new question (never bothered to ask before), what does a SOL-20 Personality Modual do?

Lol, yes - strange name. I had to look it up since I'm not familiar with the SOL either. From Sol20.org:

One neat feature of the Sol is that the boot/bios/monitor (call it what you will) ROM is on a tiny removable PC card, that Processor Technology called "Personality Modules." The intention was that you could change the "personality" of your machine by swapping in different boot ROMs. Each card contained up to 2 KB of EPROM.