A Sol-20 Web Page

I've spiffed up this humble web site a little bit by splitting it
into a few subordinate pages. It is still pretty dry, but eventually I'll get
around to having a gaussian noise animated background, marching java
elephants, and extensive use of color cycling and flashing punctuation.

Until then, here are some shortcuts (some are to this page, others lead to
other pages):

What's New
(Last update: Dec-21-2003)

Introduction

Program
Binaries and Source

Solace
Emulator (Version 3.1)

Solace
Virtual Media

Personality
Modules

Manuals

Newsletters,
Articles and Ads

Repairing the Sol
Keyboard

Links

SOLicitations

Thanks

Feedback

Introduction

This is my little attempt to document and share information about
an interesting and, arguably, historic machine.

The Sol-20 was produced by the Processor Technology Corporation back in
1977-1979.  About 10,000 of them were produced, some as kits, some as
pre-builts.  Here's a picture of one (not mine).

Processor Technology had planned on three forms of the machine:
the Sol-20, the Sol-10, and the Sol-PC (note that use of "PC" years before
IBM-PC ever showed up).  The Sol-10 was intended to be a stripped down
Sol-20, functioning as a "smart terminal."  The Sol-10 didn't have the
expansion backplane, lacked the numeric keypad (optional), had a wimpy power
supply and didn't require a cooling fan.  The Sol-PC was intended to be a
single-board computer, which was not uncommon in the day.  It was
basically the motherboard from the Sol-20.  However, it appears that few
if any configurations other than the Sol-20 were ever shipped.

Others have already done a much better job than I ever will at documenting
the history of the Sol and the company, so instead I'll just focus on
archiving listings, programs, documents, what have you.  If you want to
read an interesting account of the meteoric rise and fall of Processor
Technology, get hold of a copy of the book, Stan
Veit's History of the Personal Computer.

Oh, one more introductory note.  For a long time I've waffled over how
to pronounce "Sol."  Should it be pronounced with a long o, like "soul,"
or should it be pronounced with a short o, like "Saul?"  In October of
1999, I had the pleasure of meeting Lee
Felsenstein, the main designer of the Sol, and he said unequivocally it is
pronounced like "Saul."

SOLicitations

Known holes in the archives:

Contents of Proteus software collections, other than #7

P.T. Access newsletters after volume 2, issue 1

Do you have any relevant files you want to send my way?  I'd be
happy to host them here and give you a tip o' the hat.

Do you have any paper docs you want to send my way? Check out my Sol documents page,
and if I don't have it already, maybe it is something that I could
eventually scan, OCR, and put online.

Do you have any Sol program tapes? Perhaps you can send me a WAV file,
or I can tell you how to dump the file in HEX so that you can send that to
me. Or, barring that, maybe you could duplicate the tape, or mail it to me
so I can clone it and mail it back to you.

Do you have a Sol personality module ROM that I don't already have
archived? Can you dump its contents so I can archive it?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, let me know!

Feedback

If you want to contact me for whatever reason, try me at mailto:[email-masked]

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Last time I remembered to update this field: Dec-21-2003

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