Newsletters, Articles, Ads

A fan of the Sol computer, Stan Sokolow, ran a newsletter for Sol users from August, 1977 through the end of 1983. For the first two years of its life it was known as SOLUS News, and later changed its name to Proteus / News. Over the years, its readership, size, and publication rate varied, but it is amazing it lasted as long as it did, living about twice as long as did Processor Technology itself.

All of the issues here are in PDF format, as image-only scans. The issues of Volume 0 were supplied by Barry Watzman.

• SOLUS News, Vol. 0, 1977 (4 issues, 20 pages, 614 KB)
• SOLUS News, Vol. 1, 1978 (7 issues, 142 pages, 3.8 MB)
• PROTEUS News, Vol. 2, 1979 (7 issues, 146 pages, 3.4 MB)
• PROTEUS News, Vol. 3, 1980 (5 issues, 124 pages, 2.6 MB)
• PROTEUS News, Vol. 4, 1981 (4 issues, 104 pages, 2.5 MB)
• PROTEUS News, Vol. 5, 1982 (4 issues, 100 pages, 2.5 MB)
• PROTEUS News, Vol. 6, 1983 (4 issues, 98 pages, 1.9 MB)

Stan Sokolow also put together a compendium of all things Sol via a 12 volume "Encyclopedia Processor Technica". Most seem to be lost to the sands of time, but Jason Slade managed to retain Volume #1 after all these years. Thank you, Jason!

• Encyclopedia Processor Technica, Vol. 1, (363 pages, 230 MB)

The VDM-1, card designed by Lee Felsenstein, also became the video logic of the Sol-20. It has a weird feature called "the window shade", which allows blanking one or more rows of video, so rather than having 16 rows of 64 characters, only 15, or 14, etc, rows are visible, and the rest are just blank.

In this article Lee shows himself to be much more adept at hardware than software.

This is the article that introduced the Sol computer to the world. As a dodge to get around the fact that the publisher of Popular Electronics didn't want any more articles on computers, the Sol was presented as an "intelligent terminal." Note that Sol as presented in this article has an integrated cassette player where the numeric keypad ended up, and the motherboard is very different from what was eventually shipped.

The article offered free copies of the PCB artwork and drilling guide for the price of a SASE. Glenn Herrmannsfeldt did so back when and was kind enough to send a copy of it for this web site. It should be noted that this isn't he final design and in fact is reported to have quite a few errors.

CORONA was the cover article of that months' issue. Alas, the product never made it out of the labs. PROTEUS News, Vol. 2, No. 2, page 22 reported that the product was shelved due to patent issues.

Just after Processor Technology blew apart, Lee Felsenstein published the specs for his prototype VDM-1 replacement card, called here VDM-2. It was much more capable than VDM-1, and much more programmer friendly. It seems like many of these ideas ended up in the Osborne computer, which Lee also designed.

This is a review of the DDS debugger, and was retyped by Mr. Emmanuel Roche.