The five JUDGE newsletters that I have in my posession have been added to the newsletters page as multi-page PDF images available for download.

Judge (Joint Users of Digital Group Equipment) was a newletter jointly sponsored by Digital Group, Inc. (DGI) and Digital Group Software Systems, Inc. (DGSS) and was to become "the vehicle for communications between users and between the users and the companies" (from Volume 1, No. 1). It was to be published monthly, however the first edition was published in July of 1977 and the second edition was three months later and included August, September and October of 1977. The last edition that I have is Volume 1, No. 5 published in April of 1978 which I believe was the final edition. If I am incorrect and there are more editions available I would like to hear from anyone that may have others.

The five editions that I do have in my posession have some very good articles on bug fixes and additions which I will OCR and add to the articles page as time permits.

I will be scanning and posting all of the digital group flyers that I can find. I currently have: 1 through 9 Consolidated, 5, 7, 8, 8a, 5 through 8a Consolidated, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, Meet the digital group. I am missing 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. If anyone has any that I am missing I would sure like a high quality scan or if you're willing to part with the paper, even better...

I'm beginning with 1 through 9 Consolidated but will add others as I have time.

In digging through all of the boxes of old computer manuals, flyers, adds etc. I just couldn't find any of the earlier dg flyers so I broke down and paid $30 for an original "Flyers #1 through #9 consolidated" in good shape. The flyer(s) can be accessed on the flyers page. This flyer is pre-diskette so everything is geared toward phi-deck and audio cassette systems. "THIS FLYER IS INTENDED TO GIVE YOU AN OVERVIEW OF THE SYSTEMS AND PRODUCTS WE NOW HAVE AVAILABLE. WE ALSO HOPE TO GIVE YOU AN IDEA OF WHAT WE CONSIDER IMPORTANT IN DESIGNING EFFECTIVE COMPUTER SYSTEMS. WE'VE BROKEN THIS FLYER INTO SEPARATE SECTIONS FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE. HOPEFULLY, YOU WON'T HAVE TO WADE THROUGH PARTS IN WHICH YOU HAVE LITTLE INTEREST IN ORDER TO GET THE INFORMATION YOU'RE AFTER. THIS FLYER CONTAINS ALL PERTINENT INFORMATION FROM FLYERS 1 THROUGH 9. YOU WILL AUTOMATICALLY RECEIVE NEW FLYERS AS THEY BECOME AVAILABLE. AS ALWAYS, THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND ENCOURAGEMENT. THE DIGITAL GROUP"

In this continuing article, I will attempt to cover all aspects of restoring a digital group system beginning with the keyboard and main unit followed later by phi-deck, diskette drive and printer restoration. Bryan Blackburn has an excellent site with lots of photos of his restoration projects.

In early 2004 I was fortunate enough to find a system that was still running albeit in a strange configuration. When I received the system, it was in pretty "odd" shape. While it seemed to work well, the guts were very unusual for a dg system. The normally fragile memory boards had been replaced by a CPU piggyback card with 64k on two chips! There was also a special purpose PROM board that held three switchable PROMs. The case was in good shape with only a few scratches. The front panel was immaculate as were the other anodized aluminum parts. The toughest part was the keyboard which had some keys that were intermittent and the whole thing was yellowed from smoking.

Since the system was working, I was hesitant to just tear the thing apart so I started with the keyboard. With a great deal of advice from Bryan Blackburn, I carefully disassembled the keyboard and spent days cleaning each individual key cap with #0000 steel wool and various cleaning agents. I was very fortunate that the foam pads on the back of each key plunger had not deteriorated. I carefully cleaned the circuit board, reassembled and tested it out.... perfect!

A couple of moves and several other obligations kept me from this most enjoyable hobbie for several yeas. In that time I was fortunate enough to find two other systems, both seriously neglected but with some good boards and other stuff. One find included two brand new Phi-Deck drives still in the original boxes!!!!

Now the real fun begins. I have time to get back to restoring these venerable old machines and will build a complete chronicle of the restoration.

Well here we go (finally)! I've been threatening to build a web-site and blog related to "the digital group" computers for some time (at least three years) and now I've done it.....

The purpose is threefold.

1) To provide a place for others to learn about the technology, history and people behind the digital group.
2) To provide a permanent repository for documentation, software and information related to digital group computers.
3) Provide an open forum to discuss restoration of digital group computers.

This will be an ongoing project, so please visit and contribute, memories, hardware, software, newsletters, articles, etc.

This whole thing started about five or six years ago when I had the opportunity to buy a somwhat working phi-deck system from a very nice fellow named Bruce Tipton that had made many mods to the basic system. He was even nice enough to get the system running again before he would send it! He also sent me numerous emails that were of great assistance in getting the system back up when it arrived. I'll post those emails in a future entry or perhaps even on a seperate page.

I had lots of additional help from Bryan Blackburn who is considered the guru on restoring digital group systems and a great guy to boot!