This is the original board as produced in 1978.
Revision 1 board - Produced 2021
This information is for historical purposes. This board was designed in 1978 by Frederic Brown and Wendell Brown while they were students at Southern Institute of Technology. For the record Frederic and Wendell are not related. The FD-1 was a cheaper solution to the SWTPC DC-1 controller. The floppy diskette drives typically used with this controller was a Shugart SA-400 drive. The SA-400 was single sided and single density and only had 35 tracks. The storage capacity was about 90K. While this does not seem like much capacity, a typical program was 4K or less. This board is a SS-30 peripheral card used in SS-50 bus systems. The SS-50 bus was first developed by SWTPC and was later copied by other companies. The processor in the first SWTPC computer was a MC6800 processor running at slightly less than 1MHZ speed. Peripheral Technology later produced an updated floppy controller card - the FD-2. These were the only products produced by Peripheral Technology for the SS-50 bus until 2021.
The board is marked PTA which stood for Peripheral Technology Associates, Wendell left the partnership shortly after the board started shipping and the company then became Peripheral Technology or "PT".
Sadly no product brochures survive.
Downloads
Make these changes to your board Mod list for 1978 board. Not needed for REV 1 and up.
Click Here to download FD-1 User manual
The original FD1 board has sold out. A new board is available. The new board is a close copy of the original with the following changes. The error in the layout was corrected so no cuts and jumpers are necessary. The board has a solder mask and silkscreen. The option to install a 50 pin connector to the floppy was removed. The 50 pin connector served no purpose since the 6800 at 1MHZ was not fast enough to support a 8" floppy. The process used to copy the original board could not produce an exact copy the hand layout of the original, but the traces are close to the original.
| FD-1 Board Bare | FD-1 Rev 2 bare board | $15 |
| FD-1-ASM | Assembled FD-1 Board - Tested in SWTPC 6800 system using FLEX 2.0 | $75 |
