Thanks for your interest and encouragement.
This particular unit, the "EGA", was branded as "Bear" but it was really made by engineers (including me) that were from a company called "Allen Test Products".
Allen Test was located in Kalamazoo MI. SPX corporation purchased Bear (located in Wisconsin) sometime in the late 80's or early 90's. Later around 1993, SPX purchased Allen Test and merged the two companies. Moving many of the the Bear Engineers to Kalamazoo.
Around 1999 SPX sold or licensed their alignment business (Bear Brand) and turned over support for their older Engine analyzer / Gas Analyzer business to Cartek International.
When I was working on the EGA part of the design requirements driven by various emissions programs, was that the unit must have a floppy drive. This was usually so that the state or local government in charge could get an update of the data stored by stopping by and exchanging a floppy.
Because of the requirement for a floppy, most of our competitors decided to make their respective units PC based. I had some experience with floppy drive control and offered to make a non-PC based system that would still have floppy support. This allowed us to be able to guarantee that we could build product for a long time without worrying that a PC motherboard (or mini tower) would be obsoleted in a short time. This in fact had bitten a lot of manufacturers that had gone the PC route as sometimes it was hard to get the same motherboard for more than 6 months. Some of our engineering managers wanted to hedge their bet with the EGA so they made the case big enough to accept a PC if we weren't able to get the custom board up and running in time. This is why you see so much space inside the unit. It could enclose a mini tower.
It ended up having several advantages and a few firsts.
It was less expensive to manufacture than a PC based system. There was no significant waiting for bootup. The system proved to be very reliable as compared to some of those that were PC based.
This unit made use of a new, at the time, type of memory called FLASH. Prior to this most manufacturers used EPROM memory for the main program in many type of test equipment. These were the type of memory chip that had a little glass window, usually covered by a label indicating the version number or part number. These chips retained the memory after power was removed. At the factory these chips could be erased by removing them and placing them under ultraviolet light for about a half hour. Chips could them be reprogrammed a placed into boards. Some may remember servicing these type of units. Updates were provided by the factory as a set of chips which a technician had to swap out. Old chips were usually sent back to the factory as a core.
As you can imagine this method for updating was not ideal. When this new type of memory, FLASH, became availible it allowed easier updates in the field. Could even be done by the end user. This type of early FLASH could be completely erased in circuit. It then could be programmed byte by byte. I combined this with the older type of EPROM so that the EPROM would be able to asct kind of like a BIOS and fail safe in case the Flash was erased and power went out. Then I wrote routines that would allow you to simply turn on the unit with an update disk in place and the unit would update the FLASH memory and start the program.
As I remember, I had codes on the floppy disk so we could also make a disk that would run a program but not update the FLASH. This was with the idea that diagnostics etc. could be made availible without having to change the program in FLASH.
It may seem obvious in this day but back then this was new turf. I remember telling the VP of engineering that we wouldn't ever have to send out EPROM updates for this machine. His response was "I've heard that before!". I had to explain the concept because at that time it was not obvious. Once understood he definetely liked the idea.
Good memories thinking about this. A different time. Memory was much more expensive than now. The whole system had about 128K (thousand, not Meg or Gig) of non-volotile memory and 128K of RAM.
Hope some are interested in at least some of this. There are some other neat things about this unit if anybody is interested. Might be fun to write some custom code for this to make it a stand alone gas analyzer without the emissions testing part.
--Ben
