[sdiy] Buchla 500

[Kevin Haywood]

Just talked to Don about the 500 last month.  There were four made -  
the one in Europe was in Oslo.  I think there was another at Northern  
(Illinois or Indiana??) University.  Two CRTs, one displayed an 8x8  
matrix of 64 internal waveforms, oscilloscope style.

If I remember right, the 500 was based on an Intel chip whose  
production specs fell far short of its published specs, dooming the  
project from the start.

Kevin



On Aug 10, 2005, at 5:02 PM, Peter Grenader wrote:

> The Buchla 500 is basically a 200 with a computer interface. There was  
> no
> special circuitry in the modules themselves - they were vanilla 200.  
> The 500
> had a few  I/0 port modules, which were unto themselves and probably  
> had
> drivers, maybe DACs and ADC's??? Only three 500s were ever made to my
> knowledge...good luck finding prints!
>
> Pardon me if this reads like the beginning of the Lord of the Rings:
>
> 1) One was at Cal Arts, sold off in the mid 80's.  In the pictures  
> linked
> below, can see the I/O modules right above Mort's head and the CRT  
> next to
> his left ear. The thing barely visable under the CRT is the corner of  
> the
> QWERTY keyboard.  Jill Fraser is the blond in the photo with her legs
> crossed -there's more on her in a second:
>
> http://www.buzzclick-music.com/mort.html
>
> 2) Another is still installed at Evergreen College in Washington State  
> -
> note interface next to output module:
>
> http://www.evergreen.edu/media/musictech/images/studios/ 
> buchla200big03.jpg
>
> 3) And I third ring made it to the elves. Ah...i think a 3rd 500 made  
> it to
> Europe?  Rick?
>
> If I *really* had to track down schematics, I'd try the tech person at
> Evergreen, whoever that is.  Don, forget it.  John Payne would be the  
> only
> faculty guy at Cal Arts who would possibly know, but he retired a  
> couple of
> years ago and I'm pretty sure when the 500 left he looked skyward, said
> thank you and threw the books in an incinerator.
>
> If you can track down a guy named Ray Wersching (not sure how you spell
> that), he was the guy at Cal Arts who had the hood up on the 500's  
> computer
> most of the time, but most of that was s/w.  You must remember, it was
> archaic even before it was old.  There was no storage outside of ram  
> and a
> punch paper tape reader on the teletype.  You had to MANUALLY load the
> operation system on boot up with a series of 16 switches on the  
> faceplate of
> the machine and that operating system was never completed.  Jill Fraser
> worked with it like a dog for six months generating the control tracks  
> for
> Subotnick's Game Room and Sky of Cloudless Sulfur from his scores.  The
> thing was a mess.
>
> hope this helps.,
>
> - P
>
>