Various XCSSA Photos


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On one night we had an Embedded Systems show-n-tell. In the background you see a Teknor SBC 286 system mounted on a passive backplane. In the foreground you see an embedded 486 system board that's only about 3x6in. in size (common in assembly lines and automation systems). The one in the forground actually ran XCSSA's Linux/Apache web server for three years.
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John Baker and Tom Weeks modeling their embedded systems.
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A close-up of John's 286 Tekno SBC system.
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And a couple of his "home made" passive backplanes... ;)
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Here are some of the guys at around 3am at the Dallas First Saturday computer flea market. That's Cosmo, Tom, Charles and Randy.
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After the First Saturday event, later in the morning we head out to Fry's.
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John and a few of his "Pizza Boxes". From back to front, John's A4000, in the middle is a SPARCstation 10 with the famous "SUNW,speakerbox" audio output peripheral. In the foreground is a supreme on hand-tossed. :-)
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John getting down to business with pizza in one hand while showing off his headless VME system running NetBSD, redirecting it's X11 display manager to his zero dollar laptop via 10BT. John's so cool... In a geeky kinda way. :)
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This is Matt giving first presentation on how to hack up an MSN companion to run other (non-Windows) OS'.
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He's on a roll now... Look out!
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Ahhh.. the guts. Interestingly, this little unit uses a low cost, low power National Semiconductor x86 processor.
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Matt and Othneil (background) taking a full inventory of the chip set.
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This is a Playstation to VGA hack designed and built by Robert Rusk.. Our resident gaming/Mac geek.
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Closeup shot of his little device at work...
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Close up guts shot of the device and the spec sheets he used to build it.
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He said that he got that green PCB section out of another gaming system and kind of kludged it into place (notice the allen wrench bent over and popped through the in line RGB pots to give him his RGB signal level control.. hehe..
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The man with a plan...
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A poorly GIMP'd together shot of some of the original XCSSA members in 1999,after 3 years after changing from being CASA (Commodore Amiga of San Antonio). From left to right: John (and his m68k VME card), Gene's head, Kent, Tom, Tyler and his BeBox, Randal, and Steve. Great bunch-a guys.
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Over the years, since 1996 when Tom took over as president, we've grown little by little...
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Now we even have some pretty cool geek-chicks show up, and now days (2003) we average around 20 people per meeting.