- Lexitron VT1303
- VT1303 Inspection
- VT1303 Power & Fault Finding
- VT1303 Backing Up Disks
- VT1303 Keyboard Fix
- VT1303 Printer
- VT1303 CP/M
- VT1303 Transferring CP/M Files
- VT1303 Screen Cataracts
- VT202/1303 Keyboard Fix Revisited
It was never my intention to buy this machine. I drove out to Lewiston (just north of Adelaide) to collect another purchase, and the seller asked if i would be interested in this mammoth. It had apparently come from a South Australian government department, but had been subsequently used by the seller and his family for several years during the eighties.
I did some quick research and found that it was a word processor – not really my cup of tea. In the end, i bought it for about the value of the two drives. It also came with a daisy wheel printer, a long and heavy-duty printer cable, a couple of manuals and some beaten up looking disks. The screen looked like it had some kind of disease, which was later identified as CRT cataracts.
I was happy to find that the drives were Shugart SA400 drives because these are the first really successful 5.25″ drives.
Backing up the disks was an exercise in itself, but once done, i set the machine to work. I replaced a shorted tantalum and gave the drives some love. I started the machine up and, surprisingly, the machine booted into its word processing program.
Mild joy was short-lived: the keyboard did not work, and it was the microcontroller that had failed. At this point i should have pulled the drives and some other spares and sent it off to the recyclers. Instead, i built a teensy based replacement for the microcontroller and reverse engineered the keyboard. This act of madness yielded a system that was close enough to demonstrate the machine as a word processor.
Along the way, i had picked up hints of CP/M being available for this machine. I periodically did google searches to see if there might be some images kicking around and to my surprise about 3 years later they appeared on archive.org (thanks to the person who did that – dasher perhaps).
Once written, with some help from an Adelaide Retro Computing Group member (thanks Mick S), the machine was able to boot to CP/M and take on a new life as a computer.
If the success of a vintage computing purchase is measured by the hours endured to get it working (the primary entertainment value), then this machine has certainly delivered.
For a little history of Lexitron see the video here: