Apparently Solid State Music was founded by associates of California digital surplus dealers and of the Homebrew Computer Club. Check my WAMECO Web page for more information. One of the SSM founders was John Burgoon, the father of SSM employee and later California Computer Systems (CCS) co-founder Dan Burgoon.
The SSM circuit boards were initally colored blue, and so they were marketed as "the blue boards". Many were sold as blank boards with docs; SSM sold both kits and assembled boards.
In 2011, Bob Ammerman contacted me for a good copy of the SSM PB1 EPROM manual. The board programms 2716 and 2708. Here's why in his own words. - Herb
"I am in the process of restoring a NorthStar Horizon computer that I last used in the early 1980s. At this point I am in pretty good shape, except for the schematics of the Solid State Music PB1 EPROM Programmer board. I heavily modified the address decoding logic on the board and I'm trying to reverse engineer what I did 30+ years ago....As designed, the board uses a 4K window to address the EPROM programming socket. This is 4x bigger than it needs to be for 2708s (which I use) and 2x bigger than needed for 2716s (which I don't use). Address space is precious on my system, so I modified the board to only take a 1K window for the programmer socket. Here is how my system is addressed:
0000 .. DFFF - RAM E000 .. E7FF - Video card E800 .. EBFF - NorthStar disk controller EC00 .. EFFF - 1K window for programming socket on SSM card F000 .. FFFF - 4K of 2708 EPROM on the SSM card
"Every byte used!:" -- Bob Ammerman
Contact me for photocopies of the manuals listed below.
CB1 8080 CPU board, 26 pgs
CB1A 8080 CPU board, 26 pgs
IO2 parallel I/O board 10 pgs
IO4 instruction manual, 32 pgs
MB3 2K/4K EPROM board (1702) 8 pgs
MB4 4K/8k memory board 12 pgs
MB6B 8K memory board 20 pgs
MB8A 1K to 16K EPROM board (2708), 18 pgs
MB8 8K/16K Eprom Board (2708), 1977, 10 pgs
"MUS-X1 A high level music interpreter" docs & source, 66 pgs
OB1 Vector Jump and prototype board. 12 pgs
PB1 2708 2716 Programmer and PROM board, 26 pgs
SSM 8080 Monitor V1 listing, 1977, 50 pgs
T1 Terminator board, 1978, 10 pgs
T1 terminator board manual, 10 pgs
VB1-C 64 character video interface, 1980, 60 pgs
VB1-B Video Interface 42 pgs
VB2 Video Board, 1978, 42 pgs
VB3 80 character Video Interface, 1980, 72 pgs + 68 pgs source
VB3A 80 character video interface,
VB3A Instruction and reference manual, 1981, 60 pgs + 38 pgs source
VB3A Assembly and troubleshooting manual, 1981, 12 pgs
SSM VB3 6 X 7 character EPROM retrofit - ROM dump, 6 pgs
Herb Johnson
Copyright © 2011 Herb Johnson