On 2009-05-01, Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" writes:

No one here has ever played with any Data General computers? How
about Prime? National Semiconductor? Metrodata? Intel Multibus? How
about VME/VXI?

The first device I ever interfaced to a computer was a "mobile" robot
chassis to a DCC 116 (DG Nova clone). I put "mobile" in quotes because
I learned important lessons about torque requirements from that project.

The second was a TV camera (vidicon!) to UNIBUS.

Most of what I interfaced in the early days was various
peripherals made for other systems -- and interfaced to early 6800 and
6809 systems.

The first was a digital cassette deck bearing Ampex's name and
on the documentation as well -- but when I called them for parts I found
that they did not remember that they had made it -- until quite a bit of
digging finally got me a replacement pinch roller. I managed to write a
bunch of ROM-resident modules in the Altair 680b to make some sort of
minimal OS -- at least for saving and loading programs and saving and
loading data.

Among other things which I interfaced were bare-bones Diablo
daisywheel printers, and a 10" Calcomp drum plotter.

This of course ignores the terminals and printers which were
just plug in and (perhaps) write a driver to handle special features.

Of course all of that was at home. At work I built a
wire-wrapped 6800 based computer which served to introduce controllable
levels of noise into the signal from a Reticon solid state camera, to
experiment with what tricks could make it possible to recognize things
through lots of visual noise.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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