Subject: Neat find (in my own junk bin!) - NS 8073

From: Ethan Dicks <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun May 4 01:28:12 2003

I was collecting all of my hex LED displays into one place so I can
test them before embarking on a new 1802 project.  I even dug into
my old box of spare Elf parts and pulled out a small board with four
TIL311 displays attached to a small microcontroller board - some kind
of monitor/indicator given to me by the brother of the guy that got
me into the 1802 as a kid.

He had given it to me to harvest the TIL displays.  I finally *looked*
at the attached board to see what was on it - an NS 8073!  I used to
have access to an RB5X robot when I was a volunteer at the local science
museum in High School - same chip - the hot-item-for-a-brief-moment
microcontroller with embedded Tiny Basic.  Now, rather than harvest
the parts, I'm very tempted to reverse-engineer the schematic of the
little board to see what it does.  Looks like there's a small bipolar
PROM, a 6116 SRAM, one or two TTL chips, and the TIL311s driven by
the output pins of the 8073.  The whole thing is only a few square
inches.

The funny thing is that I'd recently picked up a few 8073s from ePay
to play with.  I was planning on hooking them up to some 8031-based
8-line LCD displays I got for a few bucks each (originally out of
some flavor of AT&T office phone, IIRC).  Sort of the Classic
Attraction principle in reverse - new toys attracting alike items
from the recesses of the junk box rather than the normal way 'round.

Has anyone else played with the 8073 (in an RB5X or not)?  If
they hadn't been so pricey 20 years ago, I might have gotten one
to experiment with back then.  

-ethan
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