Tarot Electronics – MIMIC computer

I recently received an email from Peter Groen from the Netherlands who graciously offered to donate a set of boards that he acquired some time ago.  As a vintage computer from Canada (the Ottawa area), I had to wait a couple of hours to “play it cool” and then proceeded to jump on the chance.  My specialty is Canadian computers and this was a great find.  Thank you Peter!

The board set is from 1977 and are boards from a computer made by Tarot Electronics known as the MIMIC (aka. Mutable Integrated Memory, Interface, & Controller).  The MIMIC board set is based on an Intel 8080 but some information from Jocelyn Tait’s website (the original designer) indicates that it started as a MIL 8008 based computer (similar to the MIL Mod8).   Board sets like these were offered to a local Ottawa Computer Users group and Tait offered testing and assembling assistance.

I can only guess that this board set is from that group.  An additional video board is in this group that was made by  John Ings and Don Beckta in 1977.  I will be doing some research on these boards and hope to follow-up with some further developments in trying to get it up and running.

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1 Response

  1. Hadn’t thought about my MIMIC for over 40 years. Remember buying one in about 1978 or 1979 but it was too late to use if for my neurophysiology spike train analysis which was done with an insanely complex mess of TTL. IIRC, the MIMIC system I got from Ottawa computer group had 256 bytes of RAM and FIFO in my device has 2 K bytes of SRAM. Spent a bit of time doing hand assembly to see if I could get anything running on MIMIC but shortly after moved to Vancouver and there had a PDP-11/34 to play with and never did get MIMIC to do very much afterwards. Do have a microsystems 8Kx12 DRAM board that picked up in a Toronto surplus store in 1977 but when looked at it last week (getting ready to unload a lot of my old stuff to someone who might use it) found it also needs another board for performing refresh. A nice relic from that era.

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