The Scriptovision Super Micro Script video titler is almost a home computer

Canadians, rejoice! Not only do you have curling, the Big Turk and Tim Hortons (and, when I was in BC last, Dr Pepper made with real cane sugar), you also have a number of interesting indigenous computers like the underappreciated Micro Computer Machines MCM/70 portable, the Tarot Electronics MIMIC (not to be confused with the more notorious Spartan Mimic), the Dynalogic Hyperion and of course the NABU Personal Computer. And, like your neighbours to the south, you have terminals too, most notably the Telidon and Alextel.

Terminals, however, are in many cases based on general purpose architectures, just lashed to restrictive firmware — a good example would be the DEC VT220 which is controlled by our old friend the Intel 8051 — and game consoles likewise fall naturally in this category. Plus, there's a third group of computer-adjacent devices that qualify as well: the video titlers.

Video titlers (also known as character generators) are exactly what they sound like: devices that stamp bitmap data, usually text, on top of a video signal, like this typical example from a 1992 demo video for the consumer-oriented Videonics Video Titler. Distinct from what you might do as part of an editing system, many of these machines operate in real-time and over live video input such as the classic Chyron systems. Today's titlers are usually add-on boards controlled by a standard desktop computer, but for much of their existence they came as standalone devices with their own CPUs and video hardware, and that means they can be potentially hardware-hacked like anything else.

Well, Canada, you have your own indigenous video titlers as well, and here's one designed and manufactured in beautiful Montréal: the Scriptovision Super Micro Script, circa 1985.

The Super Micro Script was one of several such machines this company made over its lifetime, a stylish self-contained box capable of emitting a 32x16 small or 10x4 large character layer with 64x32 block graphics in eight colours. It could even directly overlay its output over a composite video signal using a built-in genlock, one of the earliest such consumer units to do so. Crack this unit open, however, and you'll find the show controlled by an off-the-shelf Motorola 6800-family microcontroller and a Motorola 6847 VDG video chip, making it a relative of contemporary 1980s home computers that sometimes used nearly exactly the same architecture.

More important than that, though, it has socketed EPROMs we can theoretically pull and substitute with our own — though we'll have to figure out why the ROMs look like nonsense, and there's also the small matter of this unit failing to generate a picture. Nevertheless, when we're done, another homegrown Canadian computer will rise and shine. We'll even add a bitbanged serial port and write a MAME emulation driver for it so we can develop software quickly ... after we fix it first.

Hands-on with two Apple Network Server prototype ROMs

Grateful acknowledgement made to the several former Apple employees who materially contributed to this entry. This article wouldn't have been possible without you!

Here's why I need to do inventory more often.

This is an Apple prototype ROM I am ashamed to admit I found in my own box of junk from various Apple Network Server parts someone at Apple Austin sent me in 2003. The 1996 Apple Network Server is one of Apple's more noteworthy white elephants and, to date, the last non-Macintosh computer (iOS devices notwithstanding) to come from Cupertino. Best known for being about the size of a generous dorm fridge and officially only running AIX 4.1, IBM's proprietary Unix for Power ISA, its complicated history is a microcosm of some of Apple's strangest days during the mid-1990s. At $10,000+ a pop (in 2026 dollars over $20,700), not counting the AIX license, they sold poorly and were among the first products on the chopping block when Steve Jobs returned in 1997.

stockholm, my own Apple Network Server 500, was a castoff I got in 1998 — practically new — when the University bookstore's vendor wouldn't support the hardware and it got surplused. It was the first Unix server I ever owned personally, over the years I ended up installing nearly every available upgrade, and it ran Floodgap.com just about nonstop until I replaced it with a POWER6 in 2012 (for which it still functions as an emergency reserve). Plus, as the University was still running RS/6000 systems back then, I had ready access to tons of AIX software which the ANS ran flawlessly. It remains one of the jewels of my collection.

So when the mythical ANS MacOS ROM finally surfaced, I was very interested. There had always been interest in getting the ANS to run MacOS back in the day (I remember wasting an afternoon trying with a Mac OS 8 CD) and it was a poorly-kept secret that at various points in its development it could, given its hardware basis as a heavily modified Power Macintosh 9500. Apple itself perceived this interest, even demonstrating it with Mac OS prior to its release, and leading then-CTO Ellen Hancock to later announce that the ANS would get ROM upgrades to allow it to run both regular Mac OS and, in a shock to the industry, Windows NT. This would have made the ANS the first and only Apple machine ever sold to support it.

Well, guess what. This is that pre-production ROM Apple originally used to demonstrate Mac OS, and another individual has stepped up with the NT ROMs which are also now in my possession. However, at that time it wasn't clear what the prototype ROM stick was — just a whole bunch of flash chips on a Power Mac ROM DIMM which my Apple contacts tell me was used to develop many other machines at the time — and there was no way I was sticking it into my beloved production 500. But we have a solution for that. Network Servers came in three sizes: the rackmount ANS 300 ("Deep Dish") which was never released except for a small number of prototypes, the baseline ANS 500 ("Shiner LE"), and the highest tier ANS 700 ("Shiner HE") which added more drive bays and redundant, hot-swappable power supplies.

Which brings us to this machine.

Meet holmstock, my Network Server 700, and the second ANS in my collection (the third is my non-functional Shiner ESB prototype). This was a ship of Theseus that my friend CB and I assembled out of two partially working but rather thrashed 700s we got for "come and get them" in August 2003. It served as stockholm's body double for a number of years until stockholm was retired and holmstock went into cold storage as a holding bay for spare parts. This makes it the perfect system to try a dodgy ROM in.

I'll give you a spoiler now: it turns out the NT ROM isn't enough to install Windows NT by itself, even though it has some interesting attributes. Sadly this was not unexpected. But the pre-production ROM does work to boot Mac OS, albeit with apparent bugs and an injection of extra hardware. Let's get the 700 running again (call it a Refurb Weekend) and show the process.