This computer built by Dan Julio features a sharp looking cabinet for its card cage design.
Dan writes: “I was recently clearing out some storage and came across all my ELF stuff which dated from my sophomore through senior years in high school. The Elf was my first computer. When I was a freshmen in high school, my dad bought me a $99 Quest ELF computer which only whetted my appetite to build a bigger machine. I couldn't afford the Quest Super ELF so went about building my own Netronics ELF II clone. I knew nothing about digital electronics but the machine actually worked! Must have been the very slow clock rates. I spent all the money I earned in a variety of menial jobs on parts for the machine…”
About the board below, Dan says it was a RAM/ROM board: “I was worried about losing the data on the cassette tapes so copied it all to a 64Kbyte EEPROM and put that on a board with a 32 Kbyte SRAM. The board has a switch to manually select between the upper and lower halves of the EEPROM. There is a tiny loader program in each half that loads the selected program into the SRAM starting at location 0.”
Great idea! Those cassettes can be pretty dodgy after 35 years in a basement!
