[amsat-bb] Yet another old geek (was: RE: Looking for Commodore tracking sw)

[Douglas Braun NA1DB <doug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Myself , I build a TTL-based video display terminal around 1978,
and in 1980 I finally did a micro: A Z80 board with 16k RAM.
And I had no access to a scope at the time...
Not too long afterwards I got tired of the tape recorder data I/O,
and I build a 8" floppy drive controller, wrote a BIOS, and put CP/M
on the system.

The acme of geekiness was reached when I got an old Diablo
2.5 Megabyte cartridge disk drive, and build a controller for it, too.
Later additions included a SCSI controller that let me use whopping big
10 megabyte drives, an interface to a 7-track tape drive originally
from a PDP-8, and towards the end, a new Z-280 CPU board for the system.

And I wrote a Unix for that Z280 system, BTW.

I got rid of almost everything about 5 years ago due to lack of storage space.
All I saved was a couple of wire-wrap boards.  Maybe I will frame them or
something...

Doug
NA1DB


At 06:08 PM 4/8/01 , Howard Long wrote:
>John
>
> > Ah, youth.  You youngsters never had the delights of wiring
> > up about 65 SSI  TTL chips to support an Intel 8008 chip,
> > running at (hang on to your seat) 50 KHz!  And I did it in
> > the snow, too.   John  W5EME
>
>Right that's done it.
>
>http://www.g6lvb.com/when_i_was_a_young_chap.htm
>
>Now let's see yours.
>
>73 Howard G6LVB

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