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Massive NewLife Accelerator haul

Realitystorm

Well-known member
Last year I started reaching out, through LinkedIn, to people who worked for, or even owned, some of the companies from the 80s and early 90s that produced accelerators and other addons.

My shot in the dark paid off, Lincoln Henthorn, one of the executives from NewLife lent me his box of old manuals, disks, and even accelerators to scan, copy and photograph.

I've posted my initial scans, the manuals, and the last released driver disks to my site:
https://www.savagetaylor.com/2023/01/17/68k-accelerators-newlife-computer-corporation/
Note: some of these manuals and drivers may work with Novy boards. For example the Novy Quik30Plus appears to be nearly identical to the NewLife 25. I've sent a note to Lincoln asking if he has any information on the relationship between NewLife and Novy.

I've also shared with @Bolle the source code and CAD drawings that I found on the disks.
 

Iesca

Well-known member
Wow, that was very generous of them! And great work on the article. Please consider uploading the drivers and manuals to the Garden as well!
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
Absolute treasure trove, nice job. I attempted to do the same with MicroMac and Sophisticated Circuits, but I didn't have much luck.
 

trag

Well-known member
Excellent work. I installed a couple of the Newlife 1's back in the day.

Any chance you can track down the Outbound folks and do the same? Corey Burton (IIRC, memory is hazy) was trying to make a go of providing support for several years after they shut down.
 

Realitystorm

Well-known member
Went to visit Lincoln again yesterday to return what I had scanned and taken photos of. He was able to show me some more systems, parts, and accelerator cards he had found in storage... way more than I could give him a fair price for. So I suggested he start selling on ebay, so expect to see a lot of NewLife products coming on the market this year. Like me, he's located in the Ottawa area, so this will be great for us Canadian collectors. I also suggested he join this site, I though @Bolle and @cheesestraws might enjoy picking his brain about how the NewLife cards were made.

One thing he gave me was some of the un-populated circuit boards so I'll be adding photos of those to my site, and photos of other cards as he photographs them or lends them to me to photograph.

I also need to publish all the versions of the enablers he had on disk, I finally finished going through the hundreds of disks he lent me so now to organize it all and create stuffIt archives of all the different versions for each card.
 

paws

Well-known member
This is so great. I wonder how many of these treasure troves are still out there, with people who think that nobody cares anymore.

Do you know much about the company? How big a market was this, how many people worked there? I'd love to know more about the history, a lot gets written about Apple but the surrounding ecosystem of software and hardware is less often covered. In this particular case I'm also curious if they were in there reverse engineering boards or there was some sort of agreement/communication with Apple.
 

Realitystorm

Well-known member
I"ve been posting some history on my site, I'll ask about company size the next time I talk to Lincoln. For development: According to Lincoln, Calmos and later NewLife forward engineered the accelerators based on the 68000 data sheets and the 68030 specs and created their own video ASIC and integrated Virtual to expand the memory.
 

kkritsilas

Well-known member
Never knew that Newlife had any association with Newbridge Networks. I worked at Newbridge Networks for a year in the 1990s, as a test programmer at the Swansea production building.
 
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