Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
The Grid Compass has been on my wishlist for a long time because it features Magnetic Bubble Memory, and I have turned bubble memory into one of my hobbies. I spend a little bit of time doing a partial teardown because I thought there was a power supply problem. I got it up and running booting both MS-DOS and GridOS / CCOS. I also bought a Tempest 2107 floppy drive to go along with it. Finally, I built a GPIB-based speech synthesizer so that I could demo speech synthesis from the Grid Compass. This this is incredibly sturdy, incredibly well build, and managed to survive shipment across the country in a box with absolutely no padding material. The case is magnesium. For more vintage computer projects, see smbaker.com
The Grid Compass has been on my wishlist for a long time because it features Magnetic Bubble Memory, and I have turned bubble memory into one of my hobbies. I spend a little bit of time doing a partial teardown because I thought there was a power supply problem. I got it up and running booting both MS-DOS and GridOS / CCOS. I also bought a Tempest 2107 floppy drive to go along with it. Finally, I built a GPIB-based speech synthesizer so that I could demo speech synthesis from the Grid Compass. This this is incredibly sturdy, incredibly well build, and managed to survive shipment across the country in a box with absolutely no padding material. The case is magnesium. For more vintage computer projects, see smbaker.com
