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Testing the Z80 Chip with a 1970s Beauty

The Fairchild Sentry 610 was optimized for engineers

From clockwise from the upper left, the system comprised a disk drive, a 9-track tape, the Fairchild 24-bit CPU, a terminal and printer, the Sentry 610 Tester, and a pair of 64-pin test heads. The Sentry 610 was based on an 11 Mhz clock and a wild ECL divide-by-11 circuit made of NOR gates and flip-flops which I had to troubleshoot to fix a Magnavox TV tuner test. At the bottom, in the black area, were three-phase twist-n-lock 220V power connectors, a bank of 110V AC utility outlets, and cables running to the two test heads.

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