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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Digital Memory Lane
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panky Guru  Joined: 02/10/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1101 |
Hi all, thought this might make an interesting post for old fogies like me to ramble on about our experiences in the digital world. Enjoy,Doug. ... almost all of the Maximites, the MicromMites, the MM Extremes, the ArmMites, the PicoMite and loving it! |
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| panky Guru Joined: 02/10/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1101 |
Started off around '74 trying to make a 'Pong' unit using 555s as the timing units - sort of worked but getting the sync stable was a problem. Got entranced with the Electronics Aust EDUC8 and built that somewhere around '75, '76, it was an 8 bit serial unit using 74xxchips with 256 x 1 bit Fairchild RAM. Instruction set was a subset (sort of) of the DEC PDP-8I. Was posted to the USA for 9 months in '77 and bought Motorola 6800D2 kit to while away the hours while spending 9 months at tech school learning the IBM 360/75 and all its peripherals. .... pause, a long breath - more to come after a coffee. Doug. ... almost all of the Maximites, the MicromMites, the MM Extremes, the ArmMites, the PicoMite and loving it! |
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| panky Guru Joined: 02/10/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1101 |
Got back from the US in early '78 for a two year stint at Woomera but had a brother working for Anderson Digital Equipment in Melbourne - agents for, amoung other products, Intercolor Inc, Georgia. They had a really neat little stand alone Z80 based unit called a Compucolor II with 32kb ram integrated into a colour display case with a couple of little floppies. Way ahead of its time but was not marketed properly - actually was technically way ahead of TRS-80 for its time. Managed to get one for myself to play with! OS was cp/m like and I spent lots of hours programming in Z80 assembly - managed a working word processor that suppoted some basic formatting using colours, reverse video etc. Lots of long nights and fun. We had a very active users group in Melbourne in 80-82 More coffee ....... Doug. ... almost all of the Maximites, the MicromMites, the MM Extremes, the ArmMites, the PicoMite and loving it! |
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| panky Guru Joined: 02/10/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1101 |
...... thought it might be fun to actually build my own so bought and built from scratch the Fergusson Big Board II with 64k ram and dual double sided double density 8 inch shugart floppies. Originally ran cp/m but upgraded to zcpr2 then rewrote large sections to enhance. Still have all the zcpr2/3 source on 8 inch floppy but the BB2 got lost somewhere in one of my moves. During all this, had a play with a Nat Semi SC/MP and also a NS Pace Eval Board and a Motorola 6809 based eval board. Still have most of the Byte mags from '78 through mid 80's also Kilobaud magazine from that era (as well as Wireless Wourld, Electronics Aust and a few others). Last cp/m machine was a Televideo TPC 1 - a lovely little luggable. followed this with a TPC 2 running DOS 1 or 2 something then moved on to a whole range of Windows based machines. All the while, I had to earn aliving in the RAAF- Interdata 7/32, Data General Nova, Eclipse and M series, DEC PDP 8I, 11-03, 11-23, a bigish CDC sytem (can't remember the model), Bolt, Beranac and Newman ARPANET switch, plus some specialised Lockheed and other systems. Retired now and collect any old desktop or particularly laptop systems to resurrect/play with. Love the Maximite series-a very sincere thanks to Geoff - have just ordered a pickit 3 so the world is my oyster as long as my eyes hold out! Doug. ... almost all of the Maximites, the MicromMites, the MM Extremes, the ArmMites, the PicoMite and loving it! |
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bigmik Guru Joined: 20/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 2914 |
Panky, We used to meet for the TRS80 club in Melbourne circa 81/82 in the business office of a business called CP/M Data Systems... Ken, the owner used to let us play with his 'comodore pets' and he also had a compucolor ... Not sure if ver 1 or 2. The compucolor was way WAY outsde of my wallets capacity, and either died or never really took off. Regards, Mick Mick's uMite Stuff can be found >>> HERE (Kindly hosted by Dontronics) <<< |
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| panky Guru Joined: 02/10/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1101 |
Mick, I seem to recall it was around $800 something plus - I got mine at a knock down price as I used to moonlight at ADE evenings doing repairs for them ( day job still RAAF ) but you know, sometimes you will do anything for a new toy to play with, Doug. ... almost all of the Maximites, the MicromMites, the MM Extremes, the ArmMites, the PicoMite and loving it! |
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Lou Senior Member  Joined: 01/02/2014 Location: United StatesPosts: 229 |
Panky, We used PDP-8's in the ATE around 1975-77 at Emerson Electric, we had the contract for the F-5 radars. I trained for IBM system 32 and 34 back in 1978 in Atlanta, Ga. First computer was a TRS-80 back in 1979, CPM machines in early 80's, then PC's, Motorola microcontrollers, now uMites are the latest toys... so much in common with so many. Is RAAF Royal Australian Air Force ?? Lou Microcontrollers - the other white meat |
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| JohnS Guru Joined: 18/11/2011 Location: United KingdomPosts: 3815 |
Who misses WordStar? Or PL/M? Or DDT? John |
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psergiu Regular Member  Joined: 09/02/2013 Location: United StatesPosts: 83 |
I started on a Romanian ZX Spectrum clone: CIP02. 64 Kb RAM. As ROMs were expensive in Eastern Europe at the time, it had only a 4Kb ROM containing a "MINI-BASIC" whose main purpose was to load a 16Kb image of the full Sinclair ROM in the first ram banks, flip a bit to make them read-only and jump to address 0. This allowed for mad experiments as you could freely edit the ROM image or load anything else in it's place. I still use a WordStar-compatible editor every day: http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/ |
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9308 |
My main computer of choice 30-odd years ago, was the Atari 800XL. 1.8MHz CPU and 64KB of RAM, although, if you allowed the inbuilt 16K BASIC ROM to run, that dropped back to about 48K of RAM I think - this is going back a bit in my memory(pun not intended). I am acutely aware that the single 14mm colour MM chip, runs at approximately 78 times the speed of the Atari, and has twice the RAM all in one tiny chip costing less then twenty bucks. The Atari RAM consisted of a bank of eight 8k chips in 14 or 16 pin DIL And the MicroMite chip about to be "Officially" released, is no slouch either. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| bigmik Guru Joined: 20/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 2914 |
Panky, I used to know a bloke called David ??.... (started with W I think) who worked with the RAAF at Pt Cook around that era, What impressed me was that they were doing double sided printed circuit boards when, as hobbyists, we were really just using `daylo' (sp??) pens for single sided boards.. Seemed so much like NASA stuff at the time.. Gday Lou, I had a PDP 11-03 for a while but I never did much with it, besides boot up the system. It was a horrible beast compared to my SYSTEM80 (TRS80 clone) Regards, Mick PS. We used a pair of PDP 11-34's set up in the back of an articulated truck for many years in my job in the Victorian Racing Industry, whislt it wasnt directly my job (it was actually Don's Job) I did know how to boot it up and ran the test system up many times when the system engineer wasnt available for what ever reason. Mik Mick's uMite Stuff can be found >>> HERE (Kindly hosted by Dontronics) <<< |
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| JohnS Guru Joined: 18/11/2011 Location: United KingdomPosts: 3815 |
At least the PDP-11 had a great instruction set! Used to run a multi-user (20, I think) BASIC system (without any DEC OS) on a PDP-11/20. Had a "giant" hard drive (we didn't use that name then) with, wait for it: 64K bytes I don't really miss teletypes, which was what most of its terminals were. Shortly after was running UNIX on a PDP-11/45 then later PDP-11/70 etc and on VAX machines. CP/M at home, then CP/M-86 and a funny sort of look-alike called MS-DOS (a variant of SCP-DOS). Paul Allen & Bill G's BASIC on them. (I preferred DEC's BASIC-PLUS but a PDP-11 at home would've been awkward!) I wonder if I'm the only person who had a 9-track magtape unit at home attached to a PC running MS-DOS? (For a client, I didn't really have any other excuse.) I had "fun" with the software. John |
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| panky Guru Joined: 02/10/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1101 |
Lou, Yep, the RAAF is the good old Aussie Air Force. Spent 9 months at Lowery AFB in Denver in '77 then 2 years at Woomera South Australia again working with the USAF. Had a great Chief Master Sgt I worked for there - ex marine with an oft used expression "nuke 'em 'till they glow!" Doug. ... almost all of the Maximites, the MicromMites, the MM Extremes, the ArmMites, the PicoMite and loving it! |
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| Lou Senior Member Joined: 01/02/2014 Location: United StatesPosts: 229 |
Panky, "nuke 'em 'till they glow!"
That reminds me of an old B-52 ECM guy at Emerson used to say "Spoof 'em". He told some stories of stuff they did from B-52's. Their capabilities were amazing back then, makes me wonder what they have now. John, I remember WordStar with it's F-key overlays, but sure don't miss it. In the late 70's IBM had, I think, 12 or 15" platters on hard drives in ranges from 1 to 20mb. I remember when they came out with the smaller multiple platter drives, I think around 8", with 64mb !! They called them Piccalo's and you could get quad Piccalo's (256mb) on a system 34, a giant step for mankind. All those early drives were housed in clear plastic and you could see them run and seek. When transitioning from CPM machines to the PC's in the mid-80's, me and Zonker both had ISA Z80 cards in our PC's that allowed us to run both CPM and PC stuff on the same computer. Wow, what a trip it's been - like our grandparents going from the horse and buggy to the space shuttle - like the song says 'The Beat Goes On'. I think I'll go watch TRON again. Lou Microcontrollers - the other white meat |
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