This article originally appeared in My little (home) shop thread on Practical Machinist.
I finished my reverse engineered schematic of the Fadal 1420-1 video board. I’d estimate I have 20-25 hours into the schematic at this point.
The schematic, and observation of the control display, lead to some interesting observations about the original design.
It’s widely told that Adrian de Caussin is the one who designed the control hardware, unfortunately he passed away some time ago (a reference from 1996 indicates he’d passed by then), so this public accounting may be the only hardware level details known outside of the de Caussin family.
I did reach out to David de Caussin the younger to try and learn details about the original control development, because at this point they are considered vintage computer systems. Unfortunately I didn’t receive a reply from him, so I had to go at it myself.
Continue reading “Fadal 1420-1 Video Card Reverse Engineering and Schematic”