VIP  1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIP 2

 

 

 

 

 

2600

 

 

 

 

 

3005

 

 

 

 

 

2800

 

ZCB

 

64K Ram

 

Flashwriter 2 video

 

FD/HD controller

 

1 external Tandon 630K floppy drive

 

 

 

 

 

As above but with two external Tandon floppy drives (hard sectored) in two separate enclosures.

 

 

 

As above except that the two drives are mounted in one external (Ministore) case.

 

 

 

As above except one floppy drive is replaced by a 5 MB hard disk in ministore  case.

 

 

 

Similar to above but fitted with 2 x 8 inch Qume floppy drives, these were “soft sectored” floppies and were of  1 Mb capacity each. Drives were mounted in an external MZ chassis.

The ZCB was produced in early 1981 (by engineer Corey Selby) and most systems utilised it to replace the Z80A CPU, Prom/Ram  and Bitstreamer 1  pcbs.  Speeds ran from 2Mhz in early models up to 4Mhz in latter models of this Vector 3 range . In Vector 5 models the speed went up to 6 Mhz. There were earlier versions of these floppy based systems that used  the Z80A & Prom/Ram configuration instead and  were mounted in a MZ chassis and called the  “System B” .

 

The computer was fitted into a terminal similar  but larger than the MT terminal and fitted with a 6 slot S100 bus mounted vertically behind the CRT for the pcbs.

 

Keyboard was a “capacitive” 72 key unit and the power supply in the terminal powered up the external drives by a dc  power cable (except for the 2800 disk drive box).

 

CRT was a  12 inch  B & W  24 x 80 display.

 

Floppies used were 16 “hard sectored” double sided double density (630K capacity) types where each hole denoted the start of that sector and there was one other “index hole” which indicated sector 1.

 

The hard disk was a Seagate ST506 and this could be partitioned into either a 5 MB drive or two 2.5 MB drives. This depended on the version of CP/M o/s  loaded  and the system could boot from floppy or either side of the hard disk and load different configuration options,  ie printers and auto starting  programs.

 

There was a  RS232 and a  parallel port.  The RS232 had a connector on the rear of the terminal connected to the ZCB while the parallel printer operated from the ZCB directly by a large ribbon cable that was fed out from the rear to the terminal, as were the data cables for the external drives. Baud rate for the RS232 was from 110 to 9600.

I believe that a 10 MB HD system was briefly produced and that a 750 K “token” local area network with up to 256 users was available and it is thought that Vector was the first low cost microcomputer system to have this feature.  IBM looked at it but decided to adopt the “star” token ring system instead.

 

The CP/M o/s occupied 8K of memory leaving 56K available for the user.