I am looking for the following Personality Modules for the 7D02 Software
Logic Analyzer Plugin. Please contact me off list at dennis at ridesoft dot
com if you can help.
It is very important that I find these three:
PM-111 6809 PERSONALITY MODULE
PM101 Option 02 6502 PERSONALITY MODULE
PM102 6800 PERSONALITY MODULE
It would be nice to find these two:
PM101 Option 01 8080 PERSONALITY MODULE
PM-111 6809 PERSONALITY MODULE
I don't have much hope of ever finding these three:
PM-110 Z8001 PERSONALITY MODULE
PM-108 Z8002 PERSONALITY MODULE
PM-112 MULTIBUS PERSONALITY MODULE
The 7D02 is a software logic analyzer plugin for the 7000 series as opposed
to the 7D01 which is a hardware logic analyzer plugin. The difference is
night and day.
* The 7D01 hardware logic analyzer can help you analyze a computer bus or
any system with a lot of interconnected signals by simultaneously capturing
the timing relationship of up to 16 signals.
* The 7D02 software logic analyzer disassembles the addresses and software
instructions being executed by a CPU as it steps through its instructions
and reads or writes data. In order to do this the 7D02 requires a
Personality Module for the particular CPU it will be analyzing. The
Personality Module intercepts each software instruction and converts it to
human readable instructions and provides this along with the address of the
instruction, the data being fetched or written, etc.
The useful product lifetime of a logic analyzer is extremely short in part
because they are extremely difficult to develop and just about the time they
are ready for market the CPU manufacturers come out with newer architectures
that make the logic analyzers obsolete. In addition, logic analyzers are
very expensive the entire development cost will have to be spread across
relatively few customers. A side effect of that is to make customers even
more reluctant to invest in something that costs so much if the costs can't
be amortized over at least 5 years.
Bottom line: Not many 7D02 logic analyzers were ever sold. In order to use
the 7D02 you had to also buy the right Personality Module to go with it.
Tektronix made 12 different personality modules for the 7D02. These are
rather small and easy to be misplaced. After a customer completed
development of their product the 7D02 would be put in a cabinet and probably
never get used again. The personality module would eventually get separated
from the logic analyzer and, since it didn't look like much, eventually it
would get tossed.
By now the personality modules are almost impossible to find. I have a
particularly romantic attachment to the 16-bit CPUs that were prominent in
the mid to late 1970s when I built my first personal computer. I learned how
to write assembly language for several of those CPUs and disassembling the
firmware that is running on these simple CPUs, and debugging the code is
some of the most challenging fun I can have.
Any help locating the personality modules I am looking for would be greatly
appreciated.
Dennis Tillman W7pF
