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.
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.
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
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 
I’ve met @EdS at the Cambridge Computing History Museum, and Charles Moore at Stanford University, for Forth Day 2016.
Hello all, Brian here, born 1960, spent the first twenty years around the fringes of NW Kent and SE Greater London.
I was fascinated by electricity from an early age, and this led to electronics as a hobby (and a lot of two transistor multivibrator circuits). I got most of my components from scrap circuit boards from a local electrical junk shop. Desoldering ICs was tricky until I discovered that the earth pin of a UK 13A plug could be clamped to the tip of a soldering iron and fitted exactly between the pins of 14/16 pin DILs. I had always been fascinated with computers, but the idea of having one of my own seemed an impossible dream at that time.
In 1977 I got a place in a MOD Apprenticeship (engineering technician). And so my obsession with computers began in earnest.
The apprentice training center had a HP 2000 time share system where I discovered BASIC (a gateway drug?), as well as a few microprocessor trainers (8080 and 6800). Around that time, my elder brother gave me a set of empty PCBs and construction manual for a NewBear 77-68 system. It took a while to collect all the components, but eventually I completed the CPU, UART, VDU and RAM board, although I could only afford to part populate the RAM board, the 2102 RAMs would fail faster than I could afford to replace them, so only ever had 1K available.
Bought a ZX81 kit, it stopped working after a month (ULA failure suspected) and got my money back.
After the apprenticeship, MOD(N) offered me a job at HMS Dryad as a maintainer in a team of engineers looking after their Warfare Team Trainers (basically a giant game of battleships). Initially looking after a FM1600 ship computer and FM1600B simulation computers (24 bit core store machines). Most of the time the fault-finding was just board swapping and only occasionally working to component or back-wiring level.
The warfare trainer complex was an interesting job that kept me busy for the next 25 years with new systems and simulators being added every few years ; FM1600E, F2420, Locus 16 (a control computer for aTepigen), Argus 700, Harris Nighthawk, Advance86b, SGI Origin 200, SGI Onyx 2, and SGI 02, As well as a few F100L, and LSI J11 embedded in the simulation equipments and 386, 486 and Transputers in the ship equipments.
Sadly the simulator complex became too costly to maintain and has been replaced by a new facility a few miles away. But some of the old equipment has found new homes.
During those years I had an Acorn Atom, then a Sanyo MBC 555 an early PC clone that was only compatible at the BIOS level. Eventually frustrated by the incompatible hardware I bought a 286 clone, which served me for many years, I upgraded it so many times that it became like Dave’s broom. Also had an Atari Portfolio, a Toshiba T3100 and an Epson PX-8 with the 120K Ramdisk.
During these years, my elder brother passed the remains of a PDP 8/E to me, it had no case nor PSU, and no front panel. Without any documentation there was little hope of getting it running again. A year later he then passed to me a complete but faulty PDP11/20 with lots of documentation. It took a while to diagnose the fault, a logic gate failure in an IC, but not a standard TTL part, appeared to be proprietary to DEC, but fortunately the PDP 8/E used a few of the same IC. A moment agonising and the deed was done, IC removed and transplanted and the PDP 11/20 came alive (but I only ever ran BASIC on it).
Then my wife became pregnant. The spare bedroom was needed for a nursery. It all had to go as there was nowhere else to store my toys. I gave some away and scrapped the rest. I can only say that impending fatherhood clouded my judgement as it seemed that I would have little time for hobbies for the next decade or two.
^^^ All that remains of my early machines, a few souvenir scraps. ^^^
I eventually had enough of the stress of the job, retired early, and moved to a bungalow. Still have a few boxes left to unpack, but have found that I still have a Casio PB-80, an Asus EEE PC 700, a Compaq Mini 700 (currently runnng Sigrok with a cheap Chinese logic analyser), a Toshiba Tecra 500 CDT (that I keep for a DOS app for programming a Parallax Stamp 1), and a pair of Nova 600 PC104 boards (that I used to use with small Linuxes).
My elder brother has recently paid me another visit, and passed a box of stuff the he no longer uses/needs …
But I think that needs to be a separate post.
P.S. I did not mention the Kindle Fire, Windows 7 PC, or the four iPads as I did not think they are retro enough (though maybe the iPad 1 soon will be).
“Always remember that you are unique, just like everyone else.”
Thanks for your introductions, Bruce, Dave, Ken, Brian. Some splendid backgrounds there. Please do feel free to spin off a new thread about anything specific you’ve mentioned.
(And anyone else thinking of posting an intro: do dive in, it’s not a competition! Any and all introductions are appreciated, so we can get to know each other, hear about a different path taken to the present day, be reminded of things we’d forgotten, or pointed towards things we haven’t seen before.)
Hello everyone! Thanks to @EdS for the invite!
Child of the 70s me, my first computer was a 48K Speccy. Progressed to a +3 (ooh fancy), then a BBC Master, which is my “spirit computer” (in the vein of spirit animals). Stuck with that way into the 16- and 32-bit eras, then went Archie.
Moved to the US in 2011, and foolishly left my collection of retro computers in the loft. (Plan was to only stay here 18months). Eight years on and…looks like we’re here to stay, Really need to go get the retro stuff. I miss my Master.
In my spare time I hack on emulators to scratch my retro itch. You can try them out in your browser (jsbeeb, for example). I’ve also spoken a few times about the process of developing that particular emulator: Emulating a BBC Micro in Javascript has links to videos and slides.
Nice to see some new faces and some familiar ones too. Also excited to see the FPGA folks here: I have a lattice FPGA knocking around somewhere and have got as far as flashing a light on and off on it 
Hi @mattgodbolt
Regarding FPGAs, you may be interested in a BBC B running on Lattice ICE 40 hardware.
It was created by David Banks @Hoglet a couple of years back - and details can be found on the mystorm forum
https://forum.mystorm.uk/t/bbc-model-b-implementatation-for-mystorm-blackice/258
regards
Ken
Hi, people !
My name is Iakov. I live in Moscow, Russia. I remember myself from late 80’s - so in 2006 I began to collect vintage computers - friends have found a 486 Compaq Contura 430CX at the atticks and were about to trash it - I took it home and then relised that many computers I dreamed of or just heard about in my youth and childhood can be found now on somebody’s atticks or garage. Now have about 65 machines in collection - PC’s from IBM 5150 to PIII, AMiga 3000, Kaypro 10 and some macs from IIci to G4. By profession I’m a photographer. Here’s a video about me and my collection made by local TV chanel ) - Video about me …
Welcome! Always good to see a Curta - and a bit of a surprise to see the Amsoft 3 inch floppies - which machine of yours can those be used in?
thanks ! Amsoft floppies were used with Amstrad PC8512 - my dad took it home from his job around 1988 and it was lost in 1995 - when we bough a p1 (which I still have) - we gave the Amstrad to friends who trashed it later( On Amstrad I had no games, only Cp/m, Locoscript, Logo and Basic and some buiness soft…
Oh look, three months have passed since an introduction: anyone want to step up? Let us know how you got interested, or re-interested, how you sold everything, or bought everything back, what projects you have on the go, or have abandoned…
… or of course you can start a thread about a particularly memorable experience!
I should have introduced myself a long time ago …
I have been interested in computing history for about 20 years now. It started with the computers that I grew up with (early IBM personal computers) and has branched out a little bit. I have also been in the industry for 27+ years and I am beginning to realize that some of the products I worked on professionally are going to be a part of computing history some day too. (The first AS/400s on PowerPC, the Cell processor, the BlueGene/L supercomputer, and firmware for “shingled” hard drives will probably be noteworthy in the next 20 to 30 years.)
My personal projects including trying to fully document the IBM PCjr and the mTCP TCP/IP stack and applications for DOS. I have been a moderator at the Vintage Computer Forum for 15+ years and three years ago I joined the board of directors for the Vintage Computer Federation, which now runs that forum. (It is a registered 501c3 charity.) Most recently I launched the Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest, which is about to have it’s third event.
When I get some time I’d like to explore the Kaypro machines I just purchased from my friend, port mTCP to them, and enhance my hardware hacking skills. (I’m predominately a software person so I have a lot of catching up to do.)
-Mike
Welcome, Mike! And well done for helping to run a busy forum and for setting up a new VCF - I’ve never run an event, and shouldn’t even try, but I know it’s lots of work and it’s much appreciated.
I guess it’s about time to bump this again? I learned about this forum in the recent Retrocomputing Roundtable episode.
I’m probably on the left side of the Gaussian distribution of members’ ages (32), and the first computer I owned was a 386 running Windows 3.1, but I like old computers – currently my main interest is late-70s and early-80s hobby computers like RCA COSMAC VIP, DREAM 6800, ETI-660, ACE VDU, etc. I’ve always like to write software for machines that I can understand fully (homebrew games for Game Boy, Fairchild Channel F, CHIP-8 games), and I also like computers that are simple enough that I can understand fully on the hardware side. To that end I am currently writing an emulator for the DREAM 6800 (should probably try to build a physical one too).
I have been involved in computers since growing up in the 1980’s and 90’s. I used to spend a good bit of time on old Macs and SGIs. These days I don’t spend nearly so much time on retrocomputing, but I still have a decent old Mac collection ranging from the Macintosh Portable to the Powerbook G4. For more about me, check out my personal webpage and professional webpage.
I was an occasional user on Nekochan for many years, and am still bummed that they shut down. Mostly I am looking for a place to very occasionally post retro-computing related stuff. I also need to find suitable EE-related forum, but this isn’t quite the place.
I am glad that you enjoyed Scary Bridges! I need to get to work on more posts for it.