I worked with Vince Briel on the Superboard III and it was a pleasure and an honor. But I think even before that, he was kinda getting burned out on the retro computer replica idea. I can only speculate, but I think sales were going down and it was costing him a lot of time that he didn't have. He didn't show up at the Parallax Expo in 2012 (I was supposed to have a table next to him with my Propeddle project; fortunately the table on my other side was Joe Grand and I had a great time meeting him and hanging out with him and others). I met Vince at the Maker Faire in San Mateo that year and we chatted about our projects for a while. He had just finished the Altair project and he told me he was working on the Superboard (which I had never heard of at the time). He said he had considered making a PET replica but he found my Propeddle project and changed his mind. To me, the chat with Vince the highlight of the day. I was hoping to see him again at the Maker Faire in 2013 but he decided not to go.
I speculate that the Superboard III was one last project that he worked on to motivate himself to get back into the replica business. But I'm sure he didn't sell many of them because it was so expensive with the custom keyboard (I proposed to change the schematic to make it possible to make a low-cost version with a PS/2 keyboard, and to make it possible to use the keyboard as a terminal for other replicas, but he didn't want to do that). I don't know if that's actually the reason that he stopped showing up in the forums but I noticed that the Superboard III PCB wasn't as well designed as the previous projects, and he was clearly annoyed about how spammers kept vandalizing the forums so he changed the forum so you had to ask him personally to become a member. And of course that made the whole thing less attractive to potential customers too.
I own a MicroKim (with a 32K memory expansion board), a Pocketerm (with an acrylic enclosure), a Replica One Limited Edition (basically the Third Edition with a red PCB) and a Superboard III. They are all great replicas and it was a lot of fun to build each one of those and play with them. They inspired me to do my Propeddle and L-Star projects. I still visit the forums every now and again, but it's gotten really quiet in there. I would have liked to buy an Altair replica and I would have liked to buy the MicroKim expansion board some day, but I don't have much time and seeing that he was getting hard to reach even on his own forums, I decided to back away and advise others to do the same. It appears that several people sent him money and never got their order, but I'm sure they could get (or could have gotten) their money back from the Amazon store or their credit card company.
It's a shame that Briel Computers is just fading away and no-one knows why. I'm sure that I'm not the only one to whom Vince and his company were a great inspiration. I wish Vince all the best, no matter what his reasons are to give up the replica business (and Vince, if you're reading this and you're considering getting rid of the business, you know where to find me).
===Jac
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