Tanks!
I was a charter member of the North Texas group - and we had a member
that was Howard Mauch as I recall - he had a nice audio to tape
unit - using a PLL - those magic IC's at the time - then with so
many versions - He and his wife went to KC for the KC unified version.
Our fun was not only building our computers from scratch or kit - but
writing code to drive printers of all sorts and plotters as well.
Yep - started with hard sector Pertec drives - and added a TTY.
Traded that TTY a KAR model four years ago. A friend had a friend that
designed a LSI 11 in a chip - and was making small machines for tech friends.
The design used a current loop TTY. I gave him a box of Telex paper and box
of punch paper - 8 level naturally. I gave up my 5 level years before to the
deaf.
Martin
Dave August wrote:
My pleasure, it's always fun to take a walk down memory lane.
And in a condensed version like this I left out a ton of stuff, these were
just the thing that popped into my mind.
As Jon Elson pointed out I also did my share of wirewraping, you can see on
that picture of my "last homebrew" that it was a wirewraped card for the
disk controller and had a WD1771 on it.
Funny wire wrap story *JUST* happend last month.. I had to make up a quick
klude of a counter and flip flop for the people I'm working for... ya gotta
picture a couple of DIPS in single level wirewrap sockets on a vector board
hotglued on to a board that's totaly surface mount 0402 size descretes with
a big assed 200 pin BGA mounted SOC... The young tech had NEVER SEEN
wirewrap, when I showed him my old OK hand tool and how to use it he was
totaly fascinated.. then said "I wondered how you wound those wires so
tight"... GAWD this industry is just full of kids...LOL..
This brings up yet another "war story".. I could tell you about driving up
to Stanford to the "home brew computer club meetings" and seeing the likes
of a scruffy Woz waving around an MoBo for an Apple 1.
As Ava Gardner said to Sutart Turner in her old age.... "God Stu, we were so
young and beautiful then"..
--.- Dave
"Ivan Vegvary" wrote in message
...
"Dave August" wrote in message
...
OK I'll play, and yea roughly in order...
5th Grade... summer school class, built a "multipler divider" out of
colored wood rods, was really just lookup tables but blew the
instructors mind.
6th Grade ... DigiComp
Jr High.. K&E 5 scale slip stick...
Jr High.. Old Marchants and Fridens
Freshman in Highschool, Wang with nixies and the card reader... did my
Chem home work on it
Senior in High School IBM360, honors claass took us to the "Naval Post
Graduate School" in Monterey and taught us BAL360, met Dick Hamming and
Grace Hopper there... Dick was on staff, they brought Grace in to give US
our nanoseconds...
Jr Colllege.. 2 buddies and I spent $300 on a Sharp 4 funtion to do our
electronics 101 math with.
Jr Colllege.. Burroghs B200, learned to microcode on that pig..
Fresh out of the service managed to dig up an old 4004 dev system and an
ASR33 with a reader/punch.
No long after met Gary Kildahl for the first time at a local computer
club and he GAVE me a copy of CP/M 1.4.
Met Gordon Eubanks at the same meeting, he was Gary's student and wanted
to get input from us on what to put into "BasicE" his class project that
became C-BASIC.
I spent $1000 (no typo, 1 kilobuck) to buy a Persi Dual 8 inch Floopy
drive and built my fiirst 8080 CP/M machine. Console was the ASR33 fro
the 4004 dev system. 1 year later I salvaged a I/O selectric and that
became the console.
1 year after that built a full boat 8080 CP/M machine, 64K, dual serial
ports, Console was a $200 "Soroc" Glass TTY ( Company name was an anagran
of Coors and the logo looked like the top of a beer can) printer was
genuine Centronis salvaged from a 2650 dev system.
1 year after that went to work for Gary at Digital Research... Did
original BIOS work for CPM86 on the then still Secret IBMPC.
Met Alan Cooper there he had written "Super Sort" and damed if I can
remeber the name a spread sheet program.
Do ya remember Gem and Ventura Publisher?
TI810 printers, PC, XT, AT, Clone Dejour. 2900 Bit slice. Every embedded
8 bit micro you can think of..
24 bit NTSC frame buffers and 3D Flying Logos.
SCO unix. Linux, Quad processor 4GHZ PowerPCs... Intel ZENON...
ARM, MIPS, "System on a Chip" for "Set Top Boxs".
Go here for a good picture of "history"
http://www.acmesi.com/History/index.html
--.- Dave
Fascinating, Dave!! Thanks so much
Ivan Vegvary