•48-64K 16-bit words of memory (plus parity and perhaps
error correction).
• A 10 megabyte Diablo
disk which transfers one word every 7 us, rotates in 25 ms, and has a track-to-track seek of 8 ms, and worst-case seek of 70
ms.
• A 901 line TV monitor
whose display surface is almost exactly the size of this page. It is oriented vertically, and is designed to be driven from
a bit map in the memory. It takes 32K of memory to fill the display area with a square
(825x620) raster. These dots are about 1.4 mils square. It is possible to reduce their width to about
1 mil, which gives an 825x860 raster and 44.3K of memory. The square raster can display 8000
5x7 characters with descenders or 2500 beautiful proportionally-spaced characters.
• An undecoded keyboard
which allows the processor to determine exactly when each key is depressed or released, and a mouse or other pointing
device.
• A processor which
executes Nova instructions at about 1.5 us/instruction, and can be extended with extra instructions suitable for
interpreting Lisp, Bcpl, MPS, or whatever.
• A high-bandwidth (10
MHz) communication interface whose details are not yet specified.
• Optionally, a fixed-font
character generator similar to the one designed and built by Doug Clark. This would save a lot of memory and would
permit higher quality characters than can be done with a square raster, but adds no basically new
capability. It should cost about $500.
• Optionally, a Diablo
printer, XGP, or other hardcopy device.
• A table about 45"
wide and 25" deep to house the machine and mount the display and keyboard.
• Most important, a cost
of about $lO.5K, which can be reduced to $9.7K by the use of a 2.5 megabyte disk. The cost is about equally split among
disk, memory, and everything else. We have spent about twice as much on Maxc per 1974 CSL
member.