Research and preservation
MO5’s research collections share the methods, sources and expertise used to preserve digital heritage.
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13 April 2023
In this sixth article, we are going to review the members of the MO5 association who are working to restore our Micral N and get it running again! Jean-François Del Nero : Jean-François is our chief technical engineer. Give him anything with a bit of electronics in it, he’ll fix it, make it work, and… hack it. Inevitably. He is also a creator of genius, a…
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13 April 2023
By Sylvain Glaize. Translation by Sébastien Marty. Let’s go back a bit. From the moment we first discussed the project, there was the idea of creating a Micral N simulator. And this for two main reasons. First of all to offer everyone, at the end of the day, the opportunity of virtually handling this rare machine. Second, to be able to study a machine we…
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13 April 2023
By Philippe Dubois, President. Translation by Sébastien Marty. In this eighth article, we are going to get a little more into the heart of the matter. After having studied, reverse-engineered the Micral N’s boards and even replaced some components, we are finally about to restart our unit for the first time after almost 50 years! Indeed, the study and rev…
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28 March 2023
By Sylvain Glaize. Translation by Sébastien Marty. It is on April 5, 2021 that the very important dump session, i.e. the reading and saving of the Micral N’s ROMs, took place. These EPROMs are so old and the manufacturing density so low that it is possible to make out the individual storage transistors. Looking into their technology, we learn that the ele…
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23 March 2023
By Philippe Dubois, President. Translation by Sébastien Marty. In this fourth article, we are going to take out the main electronic boards of our Micral N to start referencing them and understanding how they work, then we will dump (copy) its read-only memories (ROMs) in a future article. Our unit visibly contains several RAM boards, one or two ROM boards…
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16 March 2023
By Sylvain Glaize. Translation by Sébastien Marty. Research The Micral N restoration project has been launched and given its condition, the goal to restart it seems quite feasible. But how does it work? What is the machine made of? Couldn’t we find some documentation? What we know is that the machine is built around what was back then the brand new Intel…
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