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Title : The Sycor Model 350 and 340 Intelligent Stand-Alone Terminals
Publisher : Sycor
Language : English
Year : 1975
Subject : Model 340 and 350 Intelligent Stand-Alone Terminals
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I worked on these from ’80 to ’82 in North Jersey and downstate New York. There was a slightly modified version of this that was used in car dealerships. They were modified to satisfy a customer called CARS which from memory stood for Computerized Automotive Retail Systems. Google is no help. We were told that the largest single installation was Thompson Florists in North Carolina. Federal Corrections (prisons) had these in all of the federal prisons. I went into the prison in Otisville, NY to fix one. We also had one installed in an Italian Auto Paint manufacturer that was bought by BASF. They would always jokingly ask us to work on a 340 that was painted purple that was a terminal on an international network operated by Olivetti. As far as I remember there was no “microprocessor” of any sort. Everything was TTL. The monitor did not have a raster in the conventional sense that you could see by turning up the brightness. In class in Ann Arbor they showed us an earlier terminal that had a boot program programmed in “E-rom”. Magnets shaped like the letter “E” were manually placed in a wire mesh in the base of the system.
I am writing my autobiography and recalling my time with Browing Ferris Industries in Hourton. One of the first to implement micro-computers. I wrote an invoicing application that would transmit data from field offices to Houston and installed in in Canada and the USA. WOW, so long ago. That TAL language was tricky but if you understood how it worked you could do some amazing things. What great memories.
Skip Stein
HJS Enterprises
I was a sycor customer engineer many years ago. I ended up going to work for one of my customers Continental Insurance where I brought up the first Sycor 440 system using their cobol before worned only with tal I and tal II on Sycor 340 cassette and 340 D Diskette systems. I loved working g for Sycor when I started they sent me to their Systems Engineering classes in Ann Arbor Michigan those were the days…
I worked for Sycor in Ann Anbor. The returned 340/350 models we rebuild or refurbished. Our systems were very popular at the time due to size good working s/w. We repaired all aspects of these terminals and just as good or better as all revisions were included.
Bill, what was the 340 Assembly language – Intel 8008 or was it an Intel 8080 ?
I tried printing out the 3D Tic Tac Toe program but could never figure out the encoding, it did not seem to be ASCII and so I could never see the op codes and operands.
Thanks
The Marine Corps bought several of these systems in the late ’70s. I was one of several technicians trained to repair the system during 6th month deployments. Our system had the dual cassette decks next to the monitor, dual floppy disks built into the desk, mag tape, and a navy reperf to cut a tape that went to the ships comm center to send the data back to Camp Lejeune. I spent two years (’77-’79) with the 34th Marine Amphibious Unit working on this equipment. Very cool to see this brochure.
My God, what memories this brings. I was the programmer for the Sycor 340 at Providence Washington Insurance in the mid 1970’s. They even had a 3D Tic Tac Toe game you could play. I would make adjustments to the data entry program so the operators could quickly enter policy information. That and some Cobol programming was the bulk of my work in what was my first software job. I tried to decode its assembly language from ascii printouts of some of the programs but was never able to figure out if it was 8008 or 8080 Intel assembly language. There were some great people there – Bill Gardiner and Bill Valcarenghi were my bosses and I worked with Arthur Ironfield, Virginia McElroy and many other great managers and coders.