Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Share your reflections or stories of New Zealand's computing past

Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby Carcenomy on Mon May 23, 2011 5:09 pm

Gibsaw wrote:It's a real shame the Poly never got more traction.

Good lord, there's some bollocks in this blurb though... obviously written by an embittered progeni supporter. :)

64k being 4 x Apple II memory... Only if you specified the minimum configuration. Even the first model of the Apple II could take 48k of RAM. (a full 64k if you switched off the ROM banks using the "language card")

How much space did the poly's ROM's occupy?

And the misguided crud about 32 bit addressing... what the hell are they talking about?! The 6809 never had 32 bit addressing, and the implementation of OS9 on the 68000 would only have had 32 bit addressing in principle until the 68020 as there wasn't an external 32bit address bus... Hardly relevant to the poly, and OS9 wasn't a Progeni product.

I hear that. Where did the drivel come from? This blog it appears, it's for the most part copy and pasted directly.

The Poly sure had some impressive features for its era - the network oriented design is pretty neat, would make total sense for educational configurations. But at the end of the day, as good as it was, there was products that just flourished in a greater way. The Apple II is one of them - it's one of the legendary-status vintage machines. The Poly is simply historic.
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby Gibsaw on Tue May 24, 2011 8:16 am

Carcenomy wrote:The Poly sure had some impressive features for its era


I was reading it's technical manual, and it also had some kind of user/system protected memory management with a dynamic bank relocation scheme. Very very interesting.

Looks like an externally implemented (i.e. outside the 6809 itself) form of protected segmentation from what I can see. Very ambitious for an 8-bit micro if it is what it looks like.

...Reading more.
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby Roly on Sun Nov 18, 2012 8:22 am

Ive just listed a poly1 on trademe is anyone is interested. like to see it go to a good home.

used to work but been in storage and now wont boot up properly. probably wont take much to get going??

http://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing ... 16&ed=true
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby Roly on Sun Nov 18, 2012 8:25 am

Image
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby Gibsaw on Tue Nov 20, 2012 5:22 pm

Lacking other pictures that are bright/clear enough to compare... is the space bar meant to be sitting that low?

It looks almost flush with the casing.
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby arjoll on Tue Nov 20, 2012 9:26 pm

The bottom row of keys all seem low - look at the keypad. I wonder if the casing has lifted a bit - missing screw or popped clip maybe?
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby acsi on Wed Nov 21, 2012 1:40 pm

I was thinking that the whole keyboard was flush with the case. Just tried looking up a picture on the web to compare with and the one on old-computers.com looks very similar (although it's not a great photo).

have never seen one of these in real life unfortunately as my schools had commodore PET's, Apple ]['s and BBC's.
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby Carcenomy on Thu Nov 22, 2012 8:27 pm

They sit low, but not THAT low. The one I've seen they sat like ~5mm above the case. The keypad ones also had removable covers, kinda like a cash register keyboard so you could change the letters.
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby Roly on Sat Nov 24, 2012 11:25 am

Hey All,

The black plate surrounding the keypad a thin metal sheet that attaches with two screws only at the far left and right sides. It bows up slightly in the middle below the spacebar. Nothing a bit of blu-tac wont fix! When pushed down flush the keys (incl spacebar) sit 5mm up - as expected.
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby Matt on Sun Feb 02, 2014 4:06 pm

Bit late in the day to revive this thread but what the hell...

YetiSeti wrote:I used these back at Logan Park High School in Dunedin around 1990-91.


I did 5 years at the park 90-94. Never did computing but I remember those polys in the corner of the middle block. They're so visually distinctive you couldn't forget them if you wanted to. Never knew they were made in NZ though.

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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby milkshakebot on Mon Jul 07, 2014 9:11 am

I went and had a cup of coffee with Perce Hapman about a year ago. He was still steamed about the whole thing and how it was ultimately dropped by the Govt. I was interested in doing a story about the Poly, but never got to it. Maybe one day.
I did go through a whole bunch of documents in the Archives relating to the Poly project. Will put them up online once I get the time.
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby tezza on Thu Jul 10, 2014 10:40 pm

milkshakebot wrote:I did go through a whole bunch of documents in the Archives relating to the Poly project. Will put them up online once I get the time.

That would be great!
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby manuka on Fri Jul 11, 2014 12:20 pm

I noticed there doesn't seem to be a wikipedia entry for the NZ Poly, perhaps that's something that should be remidied.
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby milkshakebot on Sun Aug 03, 2014 3:01 pm

tezza wrote:
milkshakebot wrote:I did go through a whole bunch of documents in the Archives relating to the Poly project. Will put them up online once I get the time.

That would be great!


Flicked them on to Andrew Trotman who will put them on his Poly project page.
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Re: Impressions of the NZ Poly?

Postby tezza on Sun Aug 03, 2014 3:04 pm

That's excellent. It's important to preserve this piece of New Zealand computing history.
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