I just finished turning one of my SUPERPROTO prototyping cards into a Swyft card. If you don’t know what a Swyft card is, Jeff Raskin was working on a low cost “appliance” computer called the Macintosh at Apple. Steve Jobs took over the project and moved the project in a quite different direction. Jeff left Apple and founded a company called “Information Appliance”. The first product was the Swyft card that plugged into an Apple IIe and ran his software. The software was an integrated word processor and calculator, which had access to Applesoft and included a few other printing and communications capabilities. Later they came out with the Swyft computer which was later licensed to Canon – which called it the Canon Cat. I didn’t explore functionality that much, but the software looks pretty clever, despite the lack of a GUI. 🙂

Once I get the rework instructions up on my SUPERPROTO Wiki, I’ll offer SUPERPROTO swyft card kits, with the components necessary to build your own SWYFT card, including preprogrammed GAL and EEPROM at the usual SUPERPROTO price of $65. The conversion of a SUPERPROTO to SWYFT card does require good soldering/rework skills, as you have to cut some traces and solder a few wires directly to pins on the back of the card. If there is enough interest, I could possibly make dedicated reproduction swyft cards.

SUPERPROTO/SWYFT Card

By the way, this was another one of those projects, where I didn’t have to buy a single part, everything needed was on hand, either part of an existing kit or in my spares bins.