Sony SMC-70
The SMC-70 is a microcomputer that was produced by Sony and released in September 1982. The system was initially released for general office use in the United States, with the SMC-70G and SMC-70GP designed for professional video generation, for example in character generation applications and digital video effect generation.
Specifications
The SMC-70 was the second Sony device that used Sony's recently invented 3.5" micro floppy disk drive that was modified to become the industry standard. Like many home and office computers of the era, it had its own specially developed version of BASIC called Sony BASIC, designed to take advantage of a color Sony Trinitron display. With optional expansion ROMs the system could display kanji characters.The system was expandable, allowing users to install a disk controller with one or two internal 3.5" disk drives. The floppy disk controller supported up to two additional 3.5" disk drives.
The base system included the following external ports: I/O expansion, black and white composite monitor, analog RGB monitor, parallel printer, light pen, cassette deck, number pad, headphone, and RS-232C.
The system could further be expanded by plug-in modules. The SMC-70 had three externally available expansion ports. Users were limited by the available power from the power supply.
Released expansion modules included:
- 256 KB RAM cache disk
- 5.25 and 8-inch FDD control unit
- Battery backup
- Chinese character ROM
- IEEE-488 interface
- Kanji ROM
- NTSC superimposer
- PAL superimposer
- RGB superimposer
- RS-232C serial interface
- RS-232C serial interface
The external I/O expansion port supported a self-powered enclosure that held an additional five modules, the Videotizer, or the 16-bit Supercharger. Internally the SMC-70 had two I/O expansion bus connectors, one of which was used by the 3.5" floppy drive controller.
With the use of the SMC-7086 Supercharger one could add a 5 MHz Intel 8086 16-bit CPU. The Supercharger also supported the addition of an Intel 8087 numeric data processor, which provided about 100 times the performance of the 8086 alone for numeric processing. The Supercharger came with a base 256 KB of RAM that was upgradable to a total of 768K via 256K expansion boards. With the Supercharger the SMC-70 could run CP/M-86. Though Sony announced the add-on would run MS-DOS 2.11, the OS was never released outside of Sony.
Other models
The SMC-70G contains additional hardware to support video production, contains a higher wattage power supply, an additional externally available expansion port on the expansion bus, two additional internal I/O expansion ports, and an NTSC video genlocker. The SMC-70GP has a PAL video genlocker. The system interfaced with video devices to mix computer generated graphics with live video.Technical specifications
Sony SMC-70 specifications:- Sharp Z80A CPU, clocked at 4.028 MHz
- HD46505S-1 CRT controller: 16 colors at, 4 colors at, black and white at
- 32 KB VRAM, 2 KB character RAM, 2 KB attribute RAM and 2 KB programmable font (PCG) RAM
- 32 KB, 9 KB system monitor, 22 KB Sony BASIC, 1 KB character font
- 25 pin 75-19200 baud rate RS-232C interface
3.5" disk drive
While the SMC-70 was Sony's first computer with a 3.5" disk drive compatible with single-sided double-density 3.5" disks, it was not the first Sony device to use the drives. In 1980, Sony announced the Series 35 word processor in the United States, which was the first product to use the technology when released in 1981.The original 3.5" floppy disk created by Sony was not compatible with later 3.5" drives due to the coercivity of the media. The drives in the SMC-70 rotated the disk at 600 RPM, which greatly improved data transfer speeds. The original Sony disk also did not contain a spring-loaded auto shutter. The user was required to slide the protective metal sleeve on the disk to the side prior to inserting the disk into the drive. When removing the disk from the drive the metal shutter was manually slid to the right to protect the disk. The SSDD disks had an unformatted capacity of 437.5 KB with 135 tracks per inch. The Sony disk drives had a transfer rate of 500 Kbps when used with DD media.
When the SMC-70 was released in 1982, the disk drives were capable of reading both the Sony standard disks and the future Microfloppy Industry Committee standard. An updated disk drive was released that had the capability of opening a spring-loaded disk shutter. Sony released an updated floppy disk based on the new standards that is compatible with both the SMC-70 and contemporary computers.
Though the SMC-70 was never offered with a double-sided disk drive, later releases of CP/M for the SMC-70 added support for double sided drives, along with 40 and 80 track 5.25" drives. Sony released three families of 26 pin 600 RPM drives, the OA-D30V, OA-D31V, and OA-D32V/W. Only the OA-D30V and OA-D31V could read the original 3.5" format due to differences in magnetic coercivity.