Introduce yourself thread

A Unitron clone? And a working one? That’s very, very interesting!
I have quite a few questions about it, if you don’t mind! :slight_smile:

By the way, I think it’s time I introduced myself.
Hi, my name is Nicola D’Agostino and as many of us I was following the Google+ Group, where I met Ed (who let me know about this forum). I’m based in Italy, although I’m not 100% italian.

I started playing and experimenting in the 80s with ZX Spectrums and C64s lent by friends and relatives. After longing for years for a computer of my own, after a short stint with an old Olivetti M240, finally got my first Macintosh, an ill-fated LC630, in the early 90s.

Although I’ve used and owned MSX systems, Amigas, IBMs with SCO, Palms, Z88… and I love any and all kinds of software (I have a small collection of UN*X boxed media) you could say I’m mostly an Apple user.
I’m voraciously interested in the history of Infinite Loop and the people who worked there, and I’ve been writing about it for italian magazines and on my two twin websites, http://www.storiediapple.it and http://www.storiesofapple.net for more than ten years. And the more I find and learn, the more I want to know. :wink:

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I can answer questions about the Unitron Mac 512 clone, but that should probably be a new thread. I got it in payment for redesigning the PALs to make it faster than the original. The analog board died, so I replaced it with one from a Mac Plus. Since I had to open it up to fix it anyway, I took some pictures: front, bottom, case and manual, motherboard, analog board and CRT and inside the case.

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A new thread would be great @jecel!

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I say go for it! I read (and enjoyed) that web page some years ago and I would love to read more first-hand technical information about the Unitron clones. :slight_smile:

First, thanks for this meeting place. I have been interested in computing since my vocational training in a steel mill in the early seventies. There were tabulating machines with plug boards and two computers: A Bull Gamma 30 and a Siemens 4004. Later, as a student, I used a Telefunken TR4. I then worked as a programmer for a german industry group with many different computers, dtmb was my nickname. Many pieces that have accumulated over the years have been left to https://www.computermuseum-visselhoeve.de/.

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Welcome, @dtmb! You’ll see I was moved to make a quick post about the TR-4.

I was born in Gela, in 1973. Had my first computer circa 1986 (a commodore 128) on which I learned
Basic and Assembler. In the 10 years between 1988 and 1998 I never touched a computer again (except for some old Macintosh at the University library and I was a happy “languages geek” all that tme). Then in 1998 I bought my first official modern age PC (some no-name beige box sporting a Celeron 266Mhz processor, no less!) but that’s when I discovered linux and my world changed again. I started digging Linux and Unix and in the year 2000 I landed my first job as a sysadmin. Now I have been working for a major linux company for the past 13 years and I used to ‘own’ the Unix Retrocomputing community on G+ before it was shutdown. I like to collect Unix boxen , especially SGI’s and I love NeXT hardware

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Hi, I’m Alun Jones, another G+ refugee, finally getting around to joining up. In 8 bit land, I’m mainly interested in the 6502, though most computing history interests me.

I’m a particular fan of Acorn machines, both the 6502 based and the early ARM based systems.

A while back, for fun, I wrote a 6502 emulator, in JAL, on an 8 bit PIC microcontroller (more of a challenge than I’d expected due to the weird addressing modes of the PIC), then ported it to C on an ESP8266 board (much easier). Some write up here, should you be interested:

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Hi. My name is Anders and I am from Denmark.

My way into computers are a tiny bit odd, as I did not buy my own computer untill the age of 17. Though my parents bought a computer for the family when I was around 10, 11 or 12. I really can not remember the exact age that I was. Yet the first computer that I ever saw, was the machines at my mothers work place. It was those mainframes, that had these giant platter storage that could be swapped. I think I was around 6 years old when I saw those computers in the power plants mainframe room.

Fast forward to around 1984, when I was 8 years old. My cusin that were 4 years older than me, bought a Commodore64. I am positive that it was am 250407 board, as the dates of production and the fact that it might have been on storage for some time, matches perfectly up with the 250407 boards. I do not remember what exact game that I played first, yet he had the machine, and for a couple of years, and it was around 1986 that I was alowed to play on it for the first time.

Around late 1987 or early 1988, the son of one of my fathers co worker, got himself an Amiga500. I was totally fixated and mesmorised by that machine. I have never seen anything like that before, and it was such a thing straight out of the future. I think I used the first good part of an hour, just staring at the physical design. And then I discovered what gaming capeabilities the darn thing had. I was in heaven.

Then in 1988, my parents bought an Unisys Pw/2 Series 300 machine. I still have that exact machine, all original and all parts. Plus the complete manual and BIOS setup disks. That machine was an 286 that was capeable of running eighter 8 or 10 mhz. It has an Paradise EGA card and Unisys branded Cherry EGA monitor. 640k of ram and 20mb MFM harddrive. It has an Cherry keyboard and an optical 3-button serial mouse. We used it for anything in the family, and my parents replaced it with an Pentium-133 in 1996/97.

In 1993 I bought my first computer. It was an 486dx33, ET4000, 4mb Ram, 120mb HDD and an Aztech sound galaxy NX Pro sound card. Sold some of the parts in 1995, as I upgraded to an 486dx2-66 VLB system.

Anyway…
I have tried tons of educations in my life, and have always felt that I was running from something. Turned out that I was running from my self, as I was diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome in mild degree when I was 39 years old. Yup… No wonder I love computers this much. Hehe.

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Hello, All!
I am a child of the Space Age. I was just barely old enough to remember watching Apollo 11. I got interested in all things High Tech. That included electronics and computers. I dreamed of owning my own computer, but in the early 70s that didn’t seem possible. Then I saw the advertisements for Radio Shack’s TRS-80. I think I was 11. It was way out of my price range, but the impossible seemed possible!
Finally, a couple of years later I got my hands on one! A TRS-80, just like in the ads. A class I took in high school had one for us to use. It was an independent study class, so we could do most anything we wanted during class. There were about six students and we took turns on the computer, teaching ourselves BASIC. It was an odd machine, with Level II BASIC but only 4K of RAM.
I mentioned electronics. Around that same time I knew enough electronics to be dangerous. Really dangerous. I lived in the landing path of the city airport. Planes flew low over my house and my friends’ house. We found a car headlight in the trash and I was convinced at least one beam would still work. We decided to make a spotlight to shine at the planes. I was young and stupid. I’m not young any more. But I didn’t grasp the whole voltage thing. I figured if 12V from the car was good, 120V (I’m in the USA) from the wall would be better. So we cut the end off an extension cord, and since I was the “engineer” I got to hold the bare wires to the bulb contacts while my friend plugged in the other end. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Oh, right. Computers.
Three or four years after I got my hands on the TRS-80, Sinclair advertised the ZX-81. The kit was only $99! Somehow I managed to get the money. My soldiering skills were, shall we say, less than wonderful. But after only one trip back to the company for repairs, it worked. I had a LOT of fun with that machine. I never could expand the RAM, so I learned to code really tight programs. Since the display only used RAM up to the last non-blank character on each line, I learned to make the lines as short as possible. I had to rotate my TV 90 degrees clockwise for my space invaders game, but it fit into 1K.
I really wanted to upgrade, though. There were lots of machines I wanted and couldn’t afford. But finally the Commodore VIC-20 went on closeout. I got one for $79 around 1983. 6502 assembly language was a lot different than the Z-80 I had been using. I was astonished at how much you could fit into a whopping 5K of RAM. I wrote a small assembler in BASIC. I bought a FORTH cartridge. I planned to add all sorts of contraptions to the user port and expansion port. I planned to build a robot with it. (I finally started building that robot about two years ago.) I was having a blast with that machine. Color was amazing.
But, then I joined the army. I got sent to Germany and wanted a portable machine I could take along easily. Epson came out with the PX-8 then (a CP/M laptop with 64K of RAM, a tape drive, and 8x80 LCD screen.) I spent many a night and weekend programming that thing. Again, I wrote an assembler in BASIC. It was a full blown assembler. And amazingly slow. That was the first “large” program I ever wrote. The second large program I wrote came from that. It was a pre-processor for BASIC to use labels instead of line numbers. I would write BASIC using Wordstar, with labels and no line numbers, run that through the pre-processor, and have a BASIC program with proper line numbers. I wanted the PF-10 disk drive for that machine, but it was $600 and unobtainable.
Since I couldn’t afford or find the disk drive, I did something different. Ampro had just come out with the Little Board plus. It was another CP/M machine, on a single board the size of a 5 1/4" disk drive. You added disk drive(s) and power supply and terminal and had a complete computer. I used the PX-8 as the terminal. It was a much better general purpose machine for less than the cost of the PX-8 drive.
After those four, my actual working machines have all been PC’s of one sort or another. I worked as a technician in a computer store when I got out of the army. It was great for buying computers and parts, right as the PC was hitting big.
But I still have all four of those first machines. I’ve been working on that VIC-20 robot lately, building various add-ons to get there. The ZX-81 is boxed up. I recently had the Ampro and the Epson out doing some work with them. I build a “disk drive” for the Epson, using and Arduino and sd card. Cost me about $10 in parts. And stores as much as a roomful of 3 1/2" floppies!
I love these little machines. I never have gotten my hands on any of the big ones, but they are cool, too. I have just been playing with these things for 40 years, not thinking anything about it. Then someone mentioned I was into “retro” computing. hmmmm, never thought of it that way.
But I loved them so much I made a career out of it. Eventually. I ended back in the army where I retired after 23 years. Now I make my living as an embedded engineer. That tight coding I learned comes in handy.
And that is my really long short story of how I got here. Let’s play!

Will

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Greetings from the future. Unfortunately we lack moon bases and personal jetpacks.

We do have a better networking infrastructure though and that video calling thing actually happened.

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Greetings. My name is Rich and I never remember not being fascinated by computers. I grew up in a very technically literate house. My dad was an EE who built nearly every electronic gadget in out house from Heatkit kits. TVs. HiFi’s, etc…

My obsession with all things Blinkenlight would later be partly or entirely explained by my Aspergers diagnosis, but that’s another long conversation for a later time.

At some point in the late 70s the TRS-80 model 1 came out and I used to find reasons to go to Radio Shack to play with the floor model. I’d go to Heathkit stores too, to play with the H8’s and H11’s. For years, when I didn’t have one, I obsessed about computers in all my waking hours. I had dreams about acquiring one.

In the early 80’s in high school we had a computer lab with about 2 dozen original 4K Commodore PETs with the chicklet keyboards. I spent as much time in that room as I possibly could. It was around that time that The Computer Chronicles came on TV, and I watched every single episode, every week, for years. This of course only added to my computer obsession! (You should all jump onto The Tube of You and watch all of these, they’re amazing!).

At some point we got a VIC-20 at home, and that was sorta fun, but my friends with C64’s were cooler.

Not long after that I got a C-128 and started having fun. At the time I was really into programming, but when I got a modem for the 128 (a 1670) I started spending more time online and less programming. As I mentioned in another thread I next got a Kaypro CP/M machine on which to run my own BBS, and about a year or two after that I got an MSDOS machine for the BBS.

I never really did get back into hardcore programming of any kind. I just like using them.

Right now I have a bunch of machines around the house running Linux. That’s my OS of choice.

I noticed someone else here made an Arduino Enigma. There was a period about 20 years ago when a friend of mine and I researched the Enigma like crazy, for years. We wanted to make a software model, and I wanted to build an actual working physical model. Not long after that, we discovered more than one person who had already made software based emulators so we shelved our projects. But it was a fascinating learning experience, and I literally have a filing cabinet in my parents’ basement filled with research materials. This led me into an exploration of modern crypto, and becoming a regular PGP/GPG user. I even got to meet Phil Zimmerman.

[RANT]
My biggest issue these days is how much credit Turing gets for “cracking” Enigma, when it was actually the 3 Polish crypto guys (Rejewski, Różycki, and Zygalski) who did most of the theoretical and practical work, which ONCE THEY HANDED THEIR WORK TO THE ALLIES, IT ALLOWED TURING TO DO HIS THING. I mean, he was a smart guy and has a tragic story, but he is given way more credit than he deserves with respect to Enigma.
[/RANT]

My dad got me into electronics as well. We subscribed to Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics, and we would build things together. I dabbled for years but never got super serious about it. I ended up studying EE but never ended up finishing my degree in it, and I went back to school for recording technology. This allowed me to combine my loves of music (musician since I was 6) and electronics. I worked full time engineering in studios for a few years, but with people recording at home, the need for real recording studios with large format consoles kind of went away. So I record when I can, part time in a local analog studio that I run with friends, and I am technical coordinator at a local fine arts museum. In the last year I got back into building things hardcore. I guess I never realized what a huge and vibrant DIY community there was for making recording equipment, but there is, and it’s very active. So in the last 6 months I’ve made 2 Neumann U87 replicas, two Urei 1176 replicas, a few vacuum tube mic preamps, and a bunch of active DI boxes. I get to use these toys in the studio, and when I do live mixing gigs for local bands.

Anyway, I ramble…

Rich…

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What an excellent opener! Thanks for telling your story - as with many before you, I encourage you to start up new topics to elaborate on anything you’ve mentioned.

I’ve started a new topic for this - see Alan Turing - and the Enigma.

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I’d just like to welcome a number of new joiners who have also made their first posts here - I might miss someone, but here goes: A big welcome to @Fedor_Steeman, @Thaddeus_Slamp, @APLe, @monsonite, @bsonej, and @BruceMcF!

And of course, I’m sure we’d all enjoy any Introduce Yourself posts anyone might contribute to this thread, who hasn’t yet done so.

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Hey, I’m a first generation “breadbox” C64 owner and from that start occasional Forth dabbler. I was in college when I got my C64 in 1982. While I had an Epson Geneva when I was in Grenada in the Peace Corps in the mid-80s, the 6502 was the only processor I programmed at the assembly language level … by the time I got a PC, all of my programming was in C, AWK or Forth. However, I’m hoping to do a little low level programming of the 6502’s big brother, the 65816, if the 8-bit Guy’s Dream Computer ends up having a 65816, either stock or as an easy to add option.

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I’ve been a member here for a while, and I’m good friends with @EdS, so it’s probably about time I introduced myself to the wider community…

I got into computers in the early '80s, first with an Acorn Atom, then later with a BBC Model B. I did a Computer Engineering degree at the University of Manchester, and then worked at HP in Bristol for the next 28 years, most of that time in the central research organisation HP Labs. I left HP in 2015, and have spent most of the time since rekindling my interest in 8-bit computing, on both the software and hardware sides.

I’m very active on the Stardot forums and all of the projects I’ve worked on are open source and are hosted on Github: hoglet67 (David Banks) · GitHub. A few of these have even made it onto the pages of Hackaday: Blog | Hackaday | Fresh Hacks Every Day.

One of the most challenging things I’m involved with at the moment is an effort to reverse engineer the Z80 at the transistor level. The majority of the hard work on this project happened about 5 years ago, before my time. But in the last year, with the help of BigEd and others, we’ve have a first version of this running on the Visual 6502 Web Site:
http://visual6502.org/JSSim/expert-z80.html

One of the drivers for this work was to discover the locations of Faggin and Shima’s traps - which were intended to frustrate attempts at reverse engineering the Z80. So far, four of these traps have been discoverered by the team, and there are probably two more that remain.

Attempts to find these two remaining traps have so far failed. I’m currently working towards a FPGA based implementation derived from the transistor netlist, with a view to being able to much more fully exercise the model.

I’m especially fond of FPGAs, and currently maintain the Acorn Atom and BBC Micro FPGA implementations. One of the things I’ve been pondering for a couple of years now is how to make hardware design with FPGAs more broadly accessible, as there is quite a steep learning curve, and some of the proprietary tools are dreadful. I’ve recently designed an FPGA Adapter add-on board for the BBC Micro, with a view to developing a series of tutorial projects. I’ve yet to actually make a start on the tutorial side of this.

Anyway, that’s probably enough for now!

Dave

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Hello, my name is Ken, based 20 miles south of London.

My first introduction to computers was at school in the early 1970s. The school had invested in a batch of electronic calculators, that were probably only 4 function, and too big to fit in all but the largest of pockets.

I joined the electronics club, which channeled my interests, and I built simple transistor radio circuits and crystal sets. One of my schoolmates fathers worked for Ferranti in Edinburgh, and I remember we were donated a lot of redundant 1960s test equipment such as valve scopes and pulse counters.

There was a lot of surplus equipment around at that time. I lived opposite a telephone exchange (central office) and got a lot of components, cable and equipment that was being scrapped from the old exchanges when the automatic Strowger equipment was being introduced in our region.

At that time - mid 1970s, you could get surplus logic boards - pulled from factory automation that would implement a few logic functions in DTL. We would strip off the diodes and transistors we recognised, and toss the pcbs.

In 1978, my secondary school bought a Research machines RM380Z system - which were being offered as part of a subsidised educational package. I learnt some BASIC, and a good friend tried (but failed) to get me into Z80 assembly language.

In my last 2 years at school, I helped run the computer club, which was mostly Sinclair ZX81s - because that’s all we could afford - and I built mine from a kit that had been reduced to £39.99. I have most of that kit remaining - some 35 years later.

At university they tried to teach us Fortran 77 running on a DEC10 - which I found a frustrating and pointless exercise, which put me off software for about 30 years.

I built a bunch of Z80A SBCs, owned a MultiTech MicroProfessor, a Jupiter Ace, and dabbled in Forth. I bought a Novix NC4016 development board in 1987, but found Charles Moore’s coding somewhat above my level of comprehension.

I’m now very interested in simple processor architectures that can be built in TTL, or synthesised in verilog on FPGAs. I follow the Gigatron TTL Computer project and I have built one using 74F series TTL that runs at 12.5MHz.

I have been involved with producing open source FPGA hardware based on the Lattice Ice 40, and making use of the Clifford Wolf’s open source FPGA toolchain.

I own a Macintosh Classic II - which still boots from floppy, but had it’s hard drive removed by a previous owner.

I follow the anycpu.org and 6502.org forums and occasionally contribute to the Gigatron forum.

My current interest is to write a tiny interpreted language to run on the Gigatron cpu - as I have a forthcoming presentation to make in about 4 weeks time :wink:

I’ve met @EdS at the Cambridge Computing History Museum, and Charles Moore at Stanford University, for Forth Day 2016.

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