Recent content by Disappearing inc

I note that the SlimCard I opened up appears to have been assembled at the tail end of 1987, or perhaps early early 1988, while the Portable ROM notes in the first post begin in June of 1988. That's just enough time that we could be looking at some redesigns in between. I wonder whether anyone...

My concern is that the Apple reader may have had additional circuitry in it which we wouldn't know about. The picture makes them look big enough that they could even have a motorized eject, for all I know. But I'll start with that schematic so we can see how the cards are put together.

I managed to contact the person who posted the MacDraw SlimCard and reader pictures to Applefritter back in 2004. She unfortunately sold them off in a lot not long after her last post and doesn't remember who they went to. Perhaps there is another reader somewhere out there, but I suspect the...

Hmm, good point. I'll have to check whether my prototype Portable contains a different ROM version than the production machines.

Oh, I just noticed that the first part of the model number on this card corresponds to the format mentioned in the Mitsubishi manual. This is a type 3 (SRAM) card of size 513, which is 512k arranged in a 16-bit format. I should also mention that the datecodes on the ICs inside the SlimCard are...

I have found a datasheet from Mitsubishi which covers the Melcard format in detail. It has some great notes in it, including the card pinout, plus a notice that custom branding is available. Sounds like Apple took them up on that...

I believe I have identified the origin of the SlimCard. It appears to be derived from the Mitsubishi Melcard. Importantly there are two generations of Melcard, with the later one having a PCMCIA-style connector, but the early one uses the same 50 pin edge connector and shutter design as the...

I lied, I went into my shop on my day off to grab some photos: Turns out I misremembered, it uses a BR2325 battery. I also note that the traces leading away from the edge connector differ between the one with and without a battery. I had initially suspected the battery-less one may...

Thanks for posting this information. I recently came into possession of two SlimCard prototypes and have found next to nothing on the internet about them. This seems as good a place as any to try to document what I've found. The design docs for the Macintosh Portable were famously leaked in...