Visual Technology was a Massachusetts-based company (Tewksbury, Lowell) best known for their line of video display terminals.
Some information about Visual's video terminals. Some old magazine advertisements can be found here and here.
There are several reference manuals and user's guides available on the net via manx. At the time of this writing, the Visual 100 Reference Manual, Visual 102 Reference Manual, and Visual 220 User's Guide were online.
In the early 1980s Visual produced a CP/M 3-based system called the 1050. This system was interesting in that in addition to the Z-80, it also included a 6502 on board as a graphics co-processor.
The 1050 design was initially developed by Ontel as part of their Amigo line. According to Bob Hanrahan in an email from September 2005:
The Amigo was a system being evaluated by Ontel during 1981 as a new cost reduced system for the very low end. The Amigo was designed originally by a company in Asia who I now have forgotten. Ontel bought the design and performed some minor modifications. Initially manufactured in Woodbury it was a textbook Z80 design with Intel 82XX peripheral chips, very similar to the Ontel architecture except designed for lowest cost. The system was based on the then advanced Zilog Z80 so it was capable of text editing using the single chip DMA, no stand alone DMA controller board was needed.
Another cousin to the 1050 was the C/WP Cortex which was what appears to be an Amigo system at the core with case modifications and software changes to promote ease-of-use.
Who owns the IP for all of this now? My guess is that nobody knows. Things seemed to devolve into a series of mergers, acquisitions, corporate renames, etc:
My guess is that anything 1050-related would belong to Powerlan USA as it seems like this was the most likely destination of Visual's assets when White Pine redirected to internet-based video as CUseeMe. Powerlan still apparently has an office in Nashua, NH where White Pine was located.
As of July 22, 2009 MESS version 0.133 has a working Visual 1050 emulation.
The emulation is not yet perfect, but works pretty well. See my emulation page for more details and some screenshots.
Currently one of the weaker areas is keyboard support. The 1050 keyboard had either an Intel 8039 or 8049 controller and associated ROM. MESS does not have a dump of these ROMs.
There are also additional versions of the Z80 and 6502 ROM that are not dumped (currently only 1.1 is available).
Finally, the available system disks are version 1.1 of the 1050 BIOS for CP/M 3 and this early version does not seem to have support for the Winchester interface to the external hard drive.
If you can help out with obtaining additional ROM dumps, system disks, or any other information, please contact me visual1050 AT metabarn DOT com.
What follows are some links to other information I have collected about the Visual 1050.
OLD-COMPUTERS.COM has a good overview of the Visual 1050.
Dave Dunfield has some additional pictures and an old advertisement from BYTE April 1984.
Some additional general notes about the system, mainly pulled from the comp.os.cpm newsgroup.
Note that the Programmer's Technical Document and the Maintenance Manual are not scanned in their entirety. I did not scan the included datasheets for the support chips since in most cases they are available from multiple sources on the net. I have included most here in the System Support section of this page.
The schematics have been scanned separately here; they were originally included as part of the Maintenance Manual.
Dave Dunfield has made system disk images in his ImageDisk format available.
Note that these disks are version 1.1 of the Visual 1050 BIOS for CP/M 3. This version of the BIOS does not have support for an external hard drive via the Winchester port. Please let me know if you can help with a different version of 1050 system disks that provides Winchester support
The CP/M 3.0 source code modified by Visual for operation on the 1050. As above, this is version 1.1 of the BIOS and does not include Winchester support.
The source to the TTY1050 communications program.
The Z-80 boot loader and 6502 graphics firmware ROMs.
The Z-80 assembly source code listing for the boot ROM.
The 6502 assembly source code listing for the graphics firmware.
If you want to build your own ROM image from source, here are some notes I made.
Here is documentation for some of the hardware in the system. Documentation for the Z80 and 6502 is so plentiful on the net I've not bothered to include them here.
Some additional 1050 specific files and programs originally from the CPMUG archives.
These include a graphic screen dump, RLE graphics, WS4 function key patch and notes on how to make a reset switch for the system.
This is the handout from a sales seminar for the Visual 1050 given back in February of 1984. It discusses strategies for positioning the 1050 in the market and provides competitive analysis against other popular systems of the day.
Visual 1050 Sales Training Handout (1.6M pdf)
I wrote a short program using PixelToaster to display the default 1050 font set. The source code (C++) includes a C array of the bitmap definitions (8x12) for this font which is potentially a handy reference for creating your own fonts for the 1050 (the 1050 uses a soft font so you can program your own definitions into the display firmware via special escape sequences. See Appendix B of the Visual 1050 User's Guide for details.)
Source code is here. An ASCII table representation of the bitmap definitions is here.
Includes some close ups of the motherboard.
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