CST Thor 21

[XorA]

I had never seen one of these before.

[martyn_hill]

Nice!

I myself am still bringing back to life a Thor XVI - I'm very impressed with CST's build quality!

[Pr0f]

Loving that Rodime hard disk!

[XorA]

Just to be clear this is currently a dead model too. PSU is kaput!

[Pr0f]

What's the power supply? - looks a bit like some of the old ASTEC models

[bwinkel67]

That's a cool looking machine inside. See that QL motherboard sitting there all expanded. Was reading the Wikipedia on CST Thor and looking at a Simon Goodwin review of the Thor XVI. How did that compare in speed to other alternatives of the day form the QL accelerators to the PC cards? Sad that "infighting" killed the Thor line.

[stephen_usher]

Just to be clear this is currently a dead model too. PSU is kaput!

Most likely the output caps, start-up cap or both. Those are what usually fail with age/heat.

[XorA]

The machine is off to its new owner, so I won't personally be doing the repairs, but they are on the forum so I bet are eagerly reading this!

[tofro]

The CST Thor 21 and making it squeeze its 32-bit-power through an 8-bit pipe was a bit of an abomination of the poor '020, IMHO. And it didn't do the actual hardware speed of the '020 over the '008 much justice (i.e. considering the '020's vastly improved throughput it simply wasn't fast enough - both for the CPU and the money). Still an interesting bit of technology, though.

But the Thor 16 was a much better design, that sadly didn't make it very long.

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi

Pity the Thor 21 manuals could not be scanned.

I have a Thor case, EPROM expansion board and disk drives but no PSU or Thor expansion board.

I suppose a QL board could be fitted to the upper part of the board and maybe do something sort of expansion board.