Well, I suppose this is a good idea... seems most everyone out here are what my son would refer to as an "old fart", and he turns 27 this year. So yes, I'm no exception on that one.
I started wielding a soldering iron at the age of 5 (half a century now). My Dad worked at a place in NJ called EAI, they made analogue computers using vacuum tubes (yes, back in the late 50's. He also had a great workbench setup... multiple plug-in soldering stations, tons of parts (vacuum tubes of course), and some hand-built test equipment. He eventually left EAI after running one of their production lines and joined IBM.
So I started out in electronics at an early age.. audio as well as my Dad built his own audio system from scratch when I was in diapers. I was mesmerized watching the blue haze bounce about in the 807 output tubes to the music and was hooked on learning about this stuff. Cut my teeth on a 1958 ARRL Radio Amateurs Handbook, which I still have to this day, along with an ancient Sylvania tube manual... still have that as well. Before my teen years I was building all kinds of audio gear using tubes and also got started in solid-state gear. At age 16 I got a job at a small high-end (at the time) audio shop that had a small recording studio in the back off from the repair shop. The owner was an engineer at Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ. The repair shop was amazingly well equipped including a General Radio frequency plotter (remember the toilet-paper freq response printouts from old audio mag reviews), lots of HP test gear and even a distortion analyzer... and this was back in the early 70's. I learned a lot and in 2 years was also re-working the Tascam console adding additional features to it and doing some design work and PCB layout for custom court recorders the company was building. I was also heavy into music (still am) and grew up playing classical trumpet from an early age. I still design and build all custom vacuum-tube equipment and still play vinyl, trumpet too. Current audio system is mostly custom and likely costs more than what most people would spend on a luxury car.
I eventually left the audio place on good terms (still good friends with the owner's son) and joined IBM... been there for 36 years now. Have worked in the field on computer hardware (really old stuff with punch cards, 80 column and 96 column, real core storage and huge disc drives that took minutes to come ready and stored less than a diskette). I got interested in the 6502 in 1982 and bought a Vic-20... and later a C64. I still have both and they still work... along with an original 1541 and a 1581 drive... all are still operational. Both the Vic and 64 are heavily socketed with many HCT logic chips are inside, including a Rockwell 65C02 in the Vic. I taught myself assembler on the Vic starting with their machine language monitor cartridge. Later on with the C64 I got Commodore's Macro Assembler package and eventually wrote a decent command processor which was resident in the autostart block and had the typical array of DOS commands like DIR, TYPE, REN, DEL, FORMAT, etc. and relocated the debug monitor as well. On the Vic I designed and built some hardware bits.... memory cards and some expansion boards... one which contained a 6551 Async controller with 1488/1489 level convertors, a MM58167 RTclock, 8KB of RAM at autostart block and a 1KB RAM at one of the I/O selects. I used this for the Xmit/Rcv buffer on the 6551 code (IRQ driven) and eventually designed and built a diskette controller based on the WD2797 and used the SO line for DRQ (yea, had to modify the Vic board a bit). I wrote a full BIOS for the diskette controller (handled 4 drives) and the 6551... as well as the 6522 for driving a parallel port printer (Commodore printers were junk). I still have all of this stuff and it still works! I later picked up the CP/M cartridge and rewrote the entire BIOS for it as the original code was amazingly slow... and later did a build that would run under my C64DOS code. I also wrote lots of code to manage the HW sprites, made software sprites and animation routines as well. Had some fun multiplexing the sprites with the raster interrupt and eventually had 64 banded HW sprites on screen.
After starting a small computer club at the branch office, I transferred to Boca to provide support for the PC. I handled HW and operating systems, which was DOS at the time (yes, did OS/2 as well). I also learned 8088/8086 assembler and can actually claim to have written the very first hard disk cloning software when we announced ESDI drives... all done in assembler on the PC and used internally for many years... and with some customers as well. Called Packcopy, it was OS agnostic as it was a full sector level copy program and was eventually used for early preloading of machines in manufacturing.
I sorta dropped off the Commodore/6502 scene for a number of years (I have more PC hardware than an average museum) and also did 2 decades of international travel including living in Germany for awhile on assignment. Having raised 3 kids (all college degrees, the oldest just got her PhD in biological research) and a full time high travel job, I had little time for fun. Now that I'm not traveling as much internationally, and being single again (my choice), I've resurrected some hobbies, the 6502 being one of them lately. I started designing a small 65C02 board back in the late 80's, but never finished it. So I decided to do just that end of last year.
I now have a small PCB done with a 65C02, 32KB RAM, 32KB ROM with clocking, memory and I/O decode and 8-I/O selects. I designed a matching I/O board with a 6551 and 65C22 and modified the SyMon code to run on it as a test, it works and is currently running at 4MHz (6551 is the limiting factor mostly). I'm planning on writing my own code complete and some additional HW boards for additional I/O like an IDE port, A/D - D/A, realtime clock and likely some video adapter.
As I have many hobbies that span many decades and technologies, my userid is floobydust. It's origins going back to a greek word meaning "a mixed bag" and was the last section in National Semiconductor's Audio Handbook from the 70's... seemed fitting
Other hobbies include mechanical work, cycling, cooking, wood working to some extent and a bit of car racing (I have a small lift in my garage to make mechanic life easier). Anyway, quite an interesting find on this forum and all of the 6502 activity, even after 2+ decades... who knew.
Regards, KM
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
I didn't realize that squirrels could be so extreme. 
