This looks like a very neat machine.
The Centre for Computing History link suggests it’s based on the DAI Imagination Machine architecture. Is that different from the DAI computer (2 MHz 8080, optional AMD maths coprocessor, optional servo-controlled cassette tape streamers)?
Stewart
Thank you for making this page. It really conveys well what a complex system this is. Nice images!
A few tips regarding the content (provided, you have any information on these):
Regarding Wordpress:
As you may have learned already (but may cause irritations), there are two sets of content in Wordpress: pages and posts. Posts are meant for blogs (organized by date and tags), pages are more suitable for a static site (organized by content relations and hierarchy), like yours. (Of course, you may have both, e.g., a static part describing the system and a blog on your ongoing explorations. On the other hand, nothing forces you to use Wordpress to run a blog and publish any posts at all.)
Pages may have some sort of structure, like parent and child relationship, but this is only reflected in the URL-layout (as in “/some-page”, “/parent/child-page”). In order to include or exclude pages in/from the visual appearance or even expose a completely different hierarchy, see the Tools menu and there the Menu section in the admin-site. (You may create any menu item you like, assign a name and the page/URL, just as you like. These may be completely unrelated to the directory hierarchy built by the parent-child arrangements in the content section. E.g., your “Home” menu item may also point to the silver-main page.)
Hi NoLand, and thank you for the input.
I will see if I van place more information on the site with your input. I am still working on the pictures of the screenshots. They were really terrible to be honest so I need to do them again. I hope to do that next week.
However, I can give you some information on your points.
Regarding the pricing. In the documentation I have I did find a price list from the company I worked for (see 2nd point). All prices are from 1987 and are in dutch guilders.
So for the fun of it I found an inflation calculator that takes the guilders from a specific year and translates that to euro’s today (with inflation until today).
So 10 guilders in 1987, is 8,95 euro today.
This makes,
The main DG-100 unit = 31.750 guilders == 28.427 euro’s today
The two memory extensions = 15.875 guilders (each) == 14.312 euro’s today (price per unit, so both = price x2)
The FADEC module, 9650 guilders == 8640 euro’s today
Software modules vary from 1135 guilders for a font cartridge (1016 euro) to 4700 guilders for a PROJECT1 cartridge (4208 euro)
That gives some idea regarding pricing.
I worked at a company that made equipment for (local) news agencies that made wat we called “Kabelkrant”. If you don’t know why that is, just think of something like a continues powerpoint presentation with local news, advertisements etcetera. This was broadcasted 24hours a day on tv by local TV providers. Each local news provider had its own area where it broadcasted (so yeah, we did see a lot of the country in those days. And I van tell you it was not funny to replace a silver in a newsroom that was located in the centre of a town where you could not get with the car 
)
We also had an in-house studio that made things like commercials for clients.
The broadcasts were made in news offices and send via modem to broadcast computers that gave the tv signals to the tv providers.
And yeah, I am working on the screenshots. This will take some work since I currently don’t have a decent working video source. And I also am working on the PC link to get a picture on a DOS pc to get some details on the picture itself. This also will take some time (mostly since I don’t have an old pc (working on that)
So hopefully this gives some more information.
As a small extra. just searched through YouTube to find something like the kabelkrant broadcasts our clients made those days. This one comes close. It gives some idea what I mean (in the quality of the day). Although I do not remember this as “one of ours”, it looks the same.
Hi Scruss,
I really can’t answer you regarding your question. I do not know the technical specs exactly between these machines. So I simply do not know.
Edwin
There’s a trove of documents here and here (also available here) which might provide some clarification. (Does not include a detailed hardware architecture.)
One of the brochures indicates that the main graphics memory has ports to 7 supplementary processors, of various kinds:
(Looking at the block diagram) Wow, quite a beast…
Funny thing is that most of the scanned documents on the echosiences site came from me. So I also tried to post a couple of them on my site. Still have to do the brochures though. So many things to do and so little time. Currently working on the PC interface. Borrowed an old pentium system with a ISA slot and finally got dos (first FreeDOS now MSdos6.22) installed on it.
The system works and it detects a silver card. Unfortunately the Silver still tells me “card not detected”.
So it is quite a puzzle where it goes wrong.
So, I’m back again.
I have been working on and off with the silver and other equipment the last weeks to get the PC-AT function working and basically get a picture from the silver saved on a pc.
in short, I had to get a pc with a 8bit ISA slot, install dos 6.22 on it and go through all my old software to find the right disk(image) that I saved all those years ago.
Then I had to order new 60pin flat cable and connectors since the old seemed to give errors (that was not the case, but hey).
I found the custom made software of our company, but better yet, I fount the original executable that was sold with the Silver and I got that last one working (the other software keeps giving me a link error). Via some other Silver user I have had contact with the original developer and he even does not have this anymore.
To get further with documenting this I now have a saved picture file and the screen prints of the software and I want to write something for that on the earlier mentioned webpage.
So i was wondering. is there someone here that has some graphical (file) knowledge that could look at the file and write something about it. just a short text to describe the technical graphical specs of this picture file.
What about posting the file here in the hope of some broader collaboration on this?
Yeah, no problem. I’ll try to place it here. Wordpress won’t accept the file since it has no idea what it is . The upload function here also won’t accept it.
So back to the good old FTP it to a folder on the site and copy-past a link here.
Link-to-picture-file
The picture itself is a really artistic (hmmmm) version of the word “Silver”. Sorry, I’m not really an artist 
However, it would probably do as a signage for an artsy coffee shop…
Regarding the image, this sems to be just a plain bitmap of RGB channels stored sequentially.
There seems to be nothing specific about this (there is no magic number indicating a file format, header or meta data, or the like). It even does not appear to have any dimensions encoded (unless I’m missing something). I guess, it’s always a full screen?
I first thought this may be 64-bit color vectors, but this is more likely one complete (8-bit) channel stored after the other. (E.g., in the first third of the data, there are many ajecent bytes with the same value, some of which seem to correspond to red values in the picture.)
For anyone willing to participate:
The file length is 216722 (0x34E92) bytes.
“Natural” color encodings of TV, I can think of, are
Assuming 8-bit channels, this is 72240 x 3 + 2 extra bytes, which would suggest an image format of 210 x 344, 258 x 280, or 301 x 240 pixels (or, rather PELs).
Any ideas?
The netpbm tools may well be enough - see here for example. (I was a great netpbm fan before I eventually found and gradually moved over to Imagemagick - that can probably do the job too.)
So it seems to be nothing too obvious (as anything like horizontal lines of color vectors or channels stored sequentially as arrays of lines). Maybe something line oriented?
Hmm, I’m seeing 210496
Even more hmm: The hex dump (via BBEdit) gives me 216722 bytes (0x000000 … 0x034E91), while the OS reports 210496, the same number you have.
So all my efforts are futile.
Nice info. Thanks.
I also found a small conversion program from those days called pic2pcx.
When I run that on the .pic file it (duh) creates a .PCX file with the output text:
Wegschrijven silver2.pcx (368x268 x 256 ) 8863 bytes.
(Where “Wegschrijven” off course means “Writing”. It was a dutch company)
So the .PCX file that was written is (I presume) resolution of 368x368 in 256 colors.
EDIT:
I remembered that “in the days” we used a command line image converter called alchemy, and yes this was also on my disks. Alchemy cannot read the .PIC file, but it can read and convert the .PCX file.
This also tells that the Width x Height = 368 x 268 and the number of colors is 256 (and a RAW size of 105248 and actual size of 9760 )
BTW, a new hex dump (using another method), correctly gives me 210496 bytes (0 … 0x3363F).
Please ignore any previous comments on this file from side, as these were based on false data (no idea, how a simple hex dump could have failed).
