The Acorn System 5

The Acorn System 5 was the final incarnation in the series, it comprised Eurocard sized boards housed in 19" Vero Card Frame.  The System 5 was a 4U height Card Frame allowing the fitting of two 'compact' floppy disk drives, it was also upgraded to a 2MHz CPU, it only came in one version: a full spec System 5.

The standard System 5 comprised:

• 6502A CPU Board (2MHz)

• 80x25 VDU Interface Board

• 32K Dynamic RAM Board (populated with 32K RAM)

• 8-Slot Backplane (fully populated with 8 sockets and buffers for the address bus)

• 4U Cased Card Frame (with 8 sets of card guides, boards fitted with front panels)

• Disk Operating System (DOS) in ROM

• System BASIC (including Floating Point) on disk

• 5V & 12V Power Supply

Optional extras:

• ASCII Keyboard

• Versatile Interface Board (VIB)

• Monitor

• Econet Node Board

• Network Operating System (NOS) in ROM

"The System 5 is housed in a 4U, 19" card frame with seven Eurocard slots. There is provision for one or two mini-floppy disk drives allowing systems with from 100 to 800K bytes of disk memory to be supplied depending upon the type of drive used.

Also used in the system is a switch mode power supply Eurocard giving 5 and 12v supplies, larger systems with two disks drives will have two of these supplied.

The system will have the 6502 CPU, the disk controller and the 32K DRAM Eurocard fitted as standard with either 80 x 25 character VDU or the 40 x 25 Teletext VDU Interface card. The remaining three card-slots can be used for memory extension. An additional 16K DRAM card gives a contiguous 48K of memory and two further 32K DRAM cards may provide a total of three 32K user pages. Alternatively these card slots can be filled with any of the interface cards; the system illustrated above has a Versatile Interface card, an Econet Interface card and 48K bytes of DRAM.

The System 5 will support any of Acorns range of languages.

An Acorn ASCII keyboard and a monochrome or colour monitor are all that is required to bring the System 5 into operation.

System 5 is only available fully assembled and tested after customer’s specification of the cards to be fitted. 2MHz 6502 versions of System 5 will be available soon."

Here is pdf of the System 5 Handbook:

System 5 Handbook [2]  (note that pages 13 & 14 are missing from the section on the 6502A Microcomputer)

Here are the individual Parts/Sections split up:

• System 5 Handbook Part 1 [2]

• System 5 Handbook Part 2 Section 1 Rack, PSU and Backplane [2]

• System 5 Handbook Part 2 Section 2 6502A CPU Board [2] (with the 2 missing pages pasted in from another source)

• System 5 Handbook Part 2 Section 3 32K DRAM Board [2]

• System 5 Handbook Part 2 Section 4 80 x 25 VDU Board [2]

• System 5 Handbook Part 2 Section 5 Floppy Disk Controller Board [2]

• System 5 Handbook Part 2 Section 6 Acorn Keyboard [2]

• System 5 Handbook Part 2 Section 7 Econet Board [2]

Here is a diagram showing the memory map of the System 5:

• Memory Map

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