This is the first version of the Dual. The case is completely custom made.
The front cover is the back, top half of a C=128 case. The rest of the case is made of aluminum.
The switches on the lower front control the power supplies and which 128 motherboard has access to the drive. The drive access switch has two lights just above it to indicate which motherboard is currently connected to the drive.
A view from the other side with the ports for the on/off switch and the joysticks.
You can see the two motherboards stacked one above the other. They slide out like drawers.
The connectors for each motherboard are color coded, blue for one, and green for the other. Just to the left of the white serial cables is the relocated power supply connector.
The blue 128 (on top) runs the SwiftLink, and the green 128 does drive I/O.
The large black rectangle on the right side of the case is an access port for the 40 & 80 column monitors cables to pass through. The smaller round one is an external serial bus port.
The idea of a networked, distributed system came from Craig Bruce's piece in Chacking 8
Quote: The OS should be designed to run on a system of between 1 and N C-128's, where N has a maximum of something like 8 or 16.
You can also write your own applications for this network, since programming it is quite easy; the hardware takes care of all of the handshaking. End quote.
The second version of the 128 Dual in it's workstation. The modem and 1581 were removed and a new front cover made. This picture was taken after the Dual was updated.The drive and modem were removed to make the 1581 Dual Drive.
The date on the photo: 9-18-95. A ten year old, 8 bit system, still fun and useful.
Below the Dual 1581 is the Serial SwitchBox. It allows me to select from the two 1541s, the two 1571s, or the Dual 1581; or any combination for device 8, and 9. The SwitchBox also allows selection of printers and has a serial bus reset button.
