There's quite a number of articles in the
ten year anniversary edition of Creative Computing, by luminaries such as Michael Crichton, Clive Sinclair, Chuck Peddle, Forrest Mims, Bill Gates, Scott Adams, Gordon Bell, Adam Osborne, Lee Felsenstein, Rodnay Zaks, Seymour Papert, Bill Budge and many more.
One
article is by Stephen B. Gray, who relates that he founded the Amateur Computer Society in 1964 and produced a newsletter. He got 110 members initially and ran the newsletter until 1976. "The original idea of the Amateur Computer Society, or ACS, was a membership organization with chapters and a newsletter or two. But the people who wrote in were so widely scattered that local chapters never got beyond the idea stage."
Quote:
Responses from prospective members ranged all the way from "I've been thinking about building a computer for some time" (two dozen of these) through "I have the shift registers completed" (a dozen of these) to "I've build a computer and am now programming it" (two of these).
Quote:
Back in the mid-sixties, to build a simple computer accumulator, which could do no more than add successive inputs, using toggle switches for input and lamps for output, cost several dollars per bit. To build an extremely simple "computer" with four-bit words and without memory, and which divided the easy way (by repeated subtraction without shifting), could cost two or three hundred dollars.
Quote:
Generally speaking, beginning amateurs hoped to use a large number of instructions, between 50 and 100. Those who had gotten fairly well into the construction used no more than 11 to 34.
Quote:
Only two of those surveyed reported being anywhere near completion of their computers.
Stephen goes on to describe the Echo IV, a very substantial homebuilt machine. He noted that it "took a year to build and would need ten years to program. Echo IV was seven feet long, one and a half feet deep, and six feet high." Also "Echo IV had four flip-flop registers, and three registers in core memory. There was 8K words of 15-bit core memory; clock speed was 160 KHz; and there were 18 instructions."
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Creative Computing magazine November 1984Scanned pages format:
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