The last mile of power lines, telephone lines, and other similar infrastructure is the most difficult to justify, the most expensive, and takes the longest to complete. DHL seems to take that last part to heart every time they see a package with my address on it. While my latest PC boards took almost an extra week at the factory (corona virus) but they made the hop from China and through US customs in record time. One more day from San Francisco to my local DHL hub and then once my local DHL received the package it took 7 more days to go the last 20 miles to my house. I am convinced they don’t even consider making the trip to our town until they have a full load, and until then they update the status with the “customer not home” excuse.
Anyway, I am glad the package finally made it and have already managed to assemble version 1.1. of the SBC-85 CPU board and a 4-slot backplane. The others included the bus monitor, cassette tape interface, Remex paper tape interface, relay output board, and one or two other miscellaneous projects. Video below if interested.
What is next? These new boards will keep me busy building / debugging / testing for most of March but I do have a memory expansion board in mind for my next PCB order. Looking at including the 8755 (2 k) for some rom and I/O plus another 6264 RAM (8K) and fill out the rest of the 64K with 2732 or 2764 EPROMS.