Nice, thanks! Some good projects cooking there...

My life in the age of electronics started in 1978 or 1977. My dad was stationed @ RAF Mildenhall, UK and the high school at RAF Lakenheath had an Interdata 7/16 mini computer, 8 ASR 33 TTY's and 3 CRTS. I was one of six or so 10 graders in Algebra class, the rest were 11'th graders except for two 12th graders. I really got into programming the computer in Basic. About a month after the class started, the instructor showed my how to IPL the system from punched tape. I wish I could remember the 50-sequence, instructions entered on the keypad to cause the OS to load from paper tape. The next year the system was upgraded to have a line printer, two 8" disk drives, and more memory. This allowed me to self-learn FORTRAN.

I would miss the bus home where I could hang out in the computer lab. I would walk an hour thru the English country side to get home. That Christmas, there was a OSI C1P or C2-4P under the tree. I remember my parents had to buy an extra transformer because I was on the computer so much. Line voltage was 240, and everything we had was 120. Man were those transformers big, and loud.

I remember a few times that the Algebra instructor would be out of town. Seems like the 7/16 would crash, usually during Spanish, and no one could bring the system back up. Shucks, I had to miss some of Spanish class!

We get back stateside in 1980, and my parents get an exemption where I could go to Gilmer high school, which offered more advanced classes than the area rural schools. Gilmer High School didn't have a computer class, but the office had a Commodore PET. I don't remember spending to much time on it, as I liked the OSI machines much more. I also got permission to take some college classes where I formally learned FORTRAN on a 360.

I attended DeVry Institute of Technology in Dallas, where COBOL and RPG became the next languages I learned. That was on an IBM 4331 or 4341 running Wylbur or Roscoe.

I was unable to finish my studies, but one day a house down the oil top road from my parents house caught fire. My dad and I went to see what we could do to help (my dad was a fire fighter during his career in the USAF). The man that owned that house was there and he had heard of a kid that was really into computers. That kid was me, and he offered me a job.

I went to work at Computer Bank, Inc in Mount Pleasant, Texas. The company wrote software for banks. I started as the night time data processor, sorting checks and generating reports for the banks on an IBM System/36. Eventually moved to programming in my beloved RPG II. My time there allowed me to begin working with PC's. My primary focus was software maintenance for all applications, Deposit, Loan and General Ledger, but I specialized in POD (Proof of Deposit) item capture, S/36 hardware and software (including PTF application) and PC to mid range interfacing. I developed a COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk) application. The midrange side was written in assembler, as manipulating text in RPG is painfully slow. That application did run length encoding and report indexing. The PC side was written in Turbo Pascal. I also was part of the conversion team, converting data from other processing software systems to the CBI platform. Also at CBI I helped transition away from the IBM S/36 over to IBM RS/6000. Somewhere in those 12 years I gave away my Ohio Scientific that had been upgraded to a C4P-MF.

From there I went to one of the banks that used CBI software. The bank used to be service bureau with CBI but with me there, they were able to go in-house. The bank had a couple of branches, connected by 9600 baud dedicated lines. I got to lead the bank's progress to ISDN communications, all on a shoestring budget and no formal training or education in communication technologies.

After 18 years I got stupid and messed that job up. Had a Russian fiance and tried to learn Russian(the middle of Siberia in winter is beautiful, if not cold), which is probably as good as my Spanish. Remained unemployed for a couple of years but now work for a large telecom company. Unfortunately I was unable to locate an IT job, so now I get to sit in a call center, doing customer service, collections and credit and activation's.

My wife (who I met in the call center) says I have to many computers. There are only 3 Raspberry Pi's, 1 Macbook Pro, 2 x86 Ubuntu systems here. At the cottage there are only 3, for now.

I used to have a stratum 1 time server up on the internet @ khronometr.sputnik-vremya.net and everything worked fine when I had Verizon/Frontier FIOS, and Spectrum/Charter Cable. But trying to do port forwarding on AT&T Uverse is an exercise in futility.

derevnya.sputnik-vremya.net is another stratum 1 time server at my dacha (cottage), but it got disconnected recently while my mom was cleaning things. Derevnya translates from Russian to "countryside". So in another 2-4 weeks (after medical restrictions are lifted) I hope to get that one back up.

Thanks for reading.

Walter

Thanks for the story, Walter. The oldest computer I used was a black-box LINK 480Z that I programmed in LOGO while the other children were in the playground but the F4s from Wattisham were a common sight overhead coming home after school. Nice memories.

F4;s would have been a bit before my time, We had F111's from Lakenheath, but I saw U2's all the time landing at Mildenhall. Never got to see an SR71, but my dad did, except he could not confirm nor deny.

Hello everyone. I guess this is a good time to introduce myself. I've had an interest in electronics as far back as I can remember. After graduating High School in 1983 I enlisted in the US Navy where I was an electronics tech. I didn't get a personal computer until the summer of 1988. I bought a used Commodore 64 a few months after getting married. I still remember learning 6502/6510 assembly language and one time in particular when I stayed up all night learning. I remember how mad my wife was in the morning, she was pregnant with our first child.
When I got out of the navy I never did get a job in electronics or programming, sadly. I remember I didn't find out about Forth until late Fall early Winter in 1991. We were in a computer store that had lots of Commodore stuff. There was this cartridge and manual for Forth. I think it was 64Forth by HES. The local library even had a copy of Starting Forth. I joined the Forth Interest Group and eagerly awaited each issue of Forth Dimensions. I also got a copy of Blazin' Forth from the local C64 bulletin board. It was much faster than the C64Forth cartridge. I remember there were some things about Blazin' Forth I found annoying like how hard it was to implement multitasking (expect was not vectored so if multitasking was implemented, any background tasks would wait until the return key was pressed) and only using drive 8. I also found the articles on metacompiling interesting so I wrote my own Forth for the C64. I remember interfacing an sp0256 speech chip to the Commodore 64. The basic demo program worked fine but the Forth demo word didn't. The C64 was sending data to the speech chip faster than it could handle it. Basic on the C64 was slow enough that the software handshaking didn't need implemented. When the handshaking was implemented, which made the C64 wait till the speech chip was ready, the Forth demo word for speech worked fine.
Not being a professional programmer, I decided to set Forth aside temporarily because I knew I had large gaps in my knowledge, expecially algorithms, and it was too much fun to try new things in Forth than studying. I used to have quite a lot of Forth related materials but in 2005 tradgedy struck. My wife broke her ankle and a couple of months later died of a pulmonary embolism. Since I was not a professional programmer or an electronics professional, I lost interest in electronics and programming. I regret that I got rid of all of my programming materials, including all my Forth stuff. If Graeme Dunbar of FIG-UK is reading this, my apollogies, I should have explained but I was feeling overwhelmed.
I recently (as in the last couple of years) decided to recreate the Forth I had for the Commodore 64. It's mostly finished but for sanding off a few rough edges. I hope this isn't too long winded or too personal, I don't have much experience with forums.

Welcome Jim, and thanks for your story. That's a real shock - good to hear you're finding your way back into the things you enjoyed before. You'll find plenty of people here interested in Forth and the 6502.

Yes, welcome, Jim! And as for not having much experience with forums, I think you'll figure it out as you go along, and find it a pleasant experience. I remember being somewhat bewildered when I joined this forum -- and yes it was my first -- but now I look forward to eavesdropping on and sometimes participating in what's going on. I'm not on that FB thing, and social media in general offers little attraction for me. But this forum is a place where I'm happy to engage, and perhaps your experience will be similar -- I hope so.

( Also on the topic of social media: for you, Jim, and others, I'll take this chance to put in a plug for my other main indulgence: Hacker News! Interesting material there, too, and discussions which are generally civil and thought-provoking. )

cheers,
Jeff

_________________
In 1988 my 65C02 got six new registers and 44 new full-speed instructions!
https://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/ ... mmary.html

Thanks, I would have replied sooner but we (my son and I) don't have internet. The Sundays I'm off, we go to Subway right after church and use their wifi.
Cheers,
Jim

Hi all, My name is Jeff. The 6502 was the first processor I learned assembly on (though I did has a Z80 based TS1000 first, paid a whole $30 for it used.) I dabble with this and that, old and new tech, and work as a research engineer for a university.

Welcome, Jeff!

Hello everyone.

Enough lurking!

Some members here may well know me from other forums.

I joined ages ago and never intended to leave doing my introduction post so late, but the distractions of life, err, distracted me!

When I was at school, back in the 1980s, I was interested in electricity. That quickly expanded to electronics, then computing. At my secondary school I managed to get into the computer studies class . We had two Acorn BBC Model B Micros (6502 CPU) complete with a disk drive each. I loved programming them with BBC BASIC . And one Research Machines 380Z (Z80 CPU).
At home, I talked my parents into getting a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k computer (Z80 CPU) for my sister and I for Christmas, and as this would be one of the most expensive "toys" that we would get (the next nearest was a bicycle for each of us), most other computers were too expensive.

I quickly learnt BASIC on the BBC machines and on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (although a lot of the time we played games).

Although I always intended to learn a bit of assembly language (for the Z80), I did not get very far. Soon, I'd finished school. At this point, my interest had shifted towards electronics more than programming. I started with hardware by reading the Maplin Magazine, Everyday Electronics and Practical Electronics magazines. So went to a technical college. In one of the classes (microelectronics I think it was called), they had AIM-65 machines. The course at the college included digital electronics, both digital logic and programming. The programming being done on a AIM-65:
This is a 6502 based computer. I had a lot of fun programming the AIM-65 and playing with some of the extra plug-in modules (well apart from the speech chip which never worked at all ). Still got some sections of the print-outs

At home, most of my interest was with DIY designs and magazine projects (including kits from Maplin Electronics) to expand my ZX Spectrum. At one point, I came close to buying a ZX81 in order to build the Channel 4 rover (the ZX81 was fixed to a motor/gear box assembly).

Learning from all these, allowed me to understand more about the hardware, than playing with a BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum alone.

While at college, I saved up and then I bought an Atari STFM520 complete with a multiscan monitor. The 8 bit computers looking like yesterday's technology. Then after that, I got a Dan IBM compatible PC. And discovered the internet... Whereupon I found web sites, forums and people still interested in 8 bit computing and electronics

Having built various kit projects for Z80 systems, and designed and built my own interface boards when I was a teenager, my re-sparked interest in 8 bit computing resulted in me acquiring an Acorn BBC Model B Micro and a Acorn BBC Master 128 machine. eBay then 'helped' me get various other 8 bit, 16 bit and 32 bit 'retro' computers.

I also got the itch to build and tinker with the electronics side again. So time to try with 6502 and related bits rather than just repairing and servicing existing computers.

Mark

Hi, I'm Patrick! I grew up programming on the Apple IIe in the 1980s.

I initially programmed in BASIC, but quickly started writing snippets of 6502 code in the Mini-Assembler to call from BASIC to make my programs go faster.

Around the 8th grade or so, I decided to write my own assembler. First, I wrote an assembler in BASIC, which I called PPAssemble. PPAssemble was incredibly slow. So, almost right after that, I wrote another assembler in assembly language, called PPAssemble II. PPAssemble took about 30 minutes to assemble PPAssemble II, while PPAssemble II could assemble itself in about 2 minutes.

I haven't done anything with the 6502 since the early 1990s, but about a month or so ago, I got the old Apple IIe out of the garage and set it up. I've started the process of transferring all of my old floppies to a USB flash drive, using the CFFA3000.

I've started dabbling in cross-compiling and cross-assembling using cc65 and ca65. So far, I like that toolchain a lot! My current project is to write a JSON parser in 6502 assembly language. (I realize that has been done before, but I thought it would be fun to do myself.)

In non-6502-land, over the past couple of years I've been playing around with AVRs (in the form of Arduino) and have learned how to make circuit boards using KiCad. I think eventually I'd like to mix this hobby with my Apple II hobby, but I haven't decided exactly what I want to do yet. Perhaps some sort of board that connects to the Apple IIe's game port.

Follow-up from http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?p=62585#p62585


Nice to meet you. I've been lurking here for a while. I will give Gigatron links in the text below. Much has been written about it elsewhere already.

Where to start about myself? I taught myself BASIC around 1983 from a PET workshop handout that I had rescued from my elementary school library's trashcan. I think a parent had donated it and the school didn't know what to do with it. I read it many times over, and when I thought I understood it, I wrote a program to test myself. It was a password verification program that also checked for the relative elapsed time between keystrokes. We didn't have a computer at school (or at home), so I wrote it on a piece of paper first and then went my friend's house to type it in on their C64. Typing took forever, all the keys were in the wrong order (QWER?!?!). But the program worked first time \o/

One year later we had a C64 at home and I had written some games in BASIC. I then taught myself machine code from a magazine I had borrowed from an uncle. At first I didn't understand a single sentence from the article. But I believed it had to make sense one way or another, so I just kept rereading the article, probably dozens of times. Later I found out it was the 2nd article in a series and I had missed the introduction of all concepts. When I slowly started to get what most of it was about, I realised I had no assembler. So I poked the first example program into memory, doing the hex conversions on paper. Again, it took forever, but it worked and it was FAST. So from that moment on, the 6502 instruction set shaped my thinking about computers. Much of high school was spent on writing games and demos. One week I wrote a multi-color sprite editor Sprite World that became somewhat popular. I managed to sell it to a German disk magazine when I was 17yo. [Edit: or maybe it was the color bar editor Color World that they actually paid me for...] With the 1000 DM cheque they sent me I would later buy a 100MB SCSI harddisk for my Amiga 500. Yeah!

Going to college my last-minute decision was to major in CS instead of physics. I got interested in computer chess by that time, which also became the topic for my Master's. Always enjoyed the ACM programming contests and their regional qualifiers. Competition was tough so we prepped a lot and I learnt much more about algorithms from these contests than from the CS curriculum. Eventually, our team made it into the ACM finals. It was in Philadelphia that year and the great attraction to me was the first Kasparov vs. Deep Blue chess match that was held at the same venue.

Wanting a career path far away from "pure software", I joined the semiconductor industry, a shift I never regretted. It is 20 years later now and I still work on developing new ways to manufacture ICs. My focus in the last few years has been on a new class of security ICs. I'm working a bit more on the business side now. My most-frequently-used-application has slowly shifted from text editors and compilers, then to Matlab, then to Excel, and now it is a lot more PowerPoint than any of the others...

I've kept computer chess programming as a hobby for a bit longer than is healthy, but now I've abandoned it completely. My legacy is that Stockfish has two algorithms in it that I discovered.

Last year, after dealing with some health issues, I decided to spend more time learning new stuff. Looking around I realised I had never done any circuit design, I didn't even own an oscilloscope! So that needed to be corrected. I set the goal to make a TTL-based circuit that could play Tic-Tac-Toe on a simple 8x8 LED matrix. I got inspiration from the Vulcan-74 project here, the Quark-85 and the Ben Eater series of instruction videos on YouTube. Also Dieter's notes on logic design are hosted on this site. So now you know why I'm lurking here. I took a bit too much inspiration however and soon I ended up with an 8-bit TTL computer on a breadboard. In the design phase (which I documented in detail on Hackaday) I took great care that it is efficient and minimalistic. It can therefore do things in software that normally need dedicated hardware. For example, its software happily generates full-color VGA signals and 4 channels of audio, while the dead time is used for application code. As a system I think it has roughly the equivalent capabilities of the Commodore VIC-20 home computer, but it is still single-board and uses only a hand full of the simplest logic chips: no microprocessor, no ALU chip, no graphics chip, no audio chip, no UART chip...

One year ago I decided to make the design available as open source and as a DIY soldering kit. The latter is a totally new project by itself, and I'm glad a very good friend offered to help out. I would have completely drowned in it otherwise: the logistics occupied us for most of the past year. We got some traction on youtube, so by now everybody has been spammed to death by the Gigatron TTL microcomputer!

As a follow-up to the original design, which supported only a game controller as input device, I spent most of this summer on PS/2 keyboard hookup and implementing BASIC. Both are now practically ready for release as a little add-on, so I'm looking for a next project. Probably something in a new domain again.

Excellent adventure! Thanks very much for introducing yourself.

If you look carefully, there is a Gigatron lurking here

Mark