Doing retro stuff doesn’t necessarily just mean doing stuff using old hardware, but also doing stuff with more limited systems, instead of modern whizz-bang-shiny systems, with tools of yesteryear. So welcome!
Now retired I operated and later programmed ICL1900 series in the 1970s, worked for ICL twice 2nd time leaving in 1999-2018.
I’ve worked at IBM and a company with lots of IBM mainframes and 3745 FEPs as I yearned to work in VTAM/NCP etc. in the 1990s
I built Nascom (Z80) computers in the 1980s
Now 2020s I play with SBC mostly RPI 5 etc.
I play retro games on mame like systems
I dabble in Meshtastic
I like fixing video TV and films
I like fixing electronic things, and can’t resist before recycling to open up and take photos and maybe some components for the junk box.
I play at a maker space where we have 3D printing and laser cutting and everything in between
I still spend far too long looking at YT and forums.
Most people address me as “Mr.G”
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Hi, Suzy here. My main interest is Microbee computers. As a child the first useable computer we had was a 32K Microbee “personal communicator”, with tape for storage. Mum and dad used it as a wordprocessor (dad was writing a book, and literally spent evenings dictating to mum, who would type). They upgraded to an MSDOS machine after six months or so (a Toshiba T300) so they could run Wordstar, and I ended up with the bee.
I discovered the technical manual for it and devoured that, and played games on it and wrote stuff, both in assembler and basic. When I was at tech I built a new coreboard for it, that even had a floppy controller, and ran CP/M.
That was unfortunately chucked out in one of the many house moves I did as a young adult, and it wasn’t until years later that I got another.
More recently I’ve been developing hardware for the bee, starting with a compact flash coreboard, which has gone through a bunch of revisions until it finally worked properly, and more recently a replacement ROM based coreboard (with 2MB of ROM) called the SuperPAK, and finally whole new Microbee compatible computers; the FreeBee, which is compatible with original Microbees, and the FreeBee Fremium, which is compatible with the later Premium model. The idea of these is to develop a machine that anyone with half decent soldering skills can construct, using mostly readily available parts, that will really give the whole experience of the original, but without the stuffed keyboards and frustration that comes with trying to get an original one going.
I’ve got a blog where I post my shenanigans, at suzyj.net
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Welcome Suzy, and welcome Mr. G too. Great to hear how you got started, and your projects.
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Hello,
I’m a enthusiastic builder and developer of retro computers. My first computer was the SC/MP and was surprised to find a SC/MP emulator in a PIC. I read the pages of PhilG and made my own version of it. (And added the HALT instruction that emulates Elektor halt-reset function.) My other systems are 6809/68HC11/Z80/Z180 based. All developed by myself and I’ve made PCB’s of it. You can find me on hackaday.io with the same nickname used here.
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Welcome @nbrok! Good to see you here.
Hello my name is Jason, I haven’t read every introduction here but I imagine I am probably on the younger side of people on this forum as I was only born in 88, my first computer was in school with DOS I’d imagine it was a 386 based on the time, I imediately did everything I could to get the most time I could on that computer, my first computer we had at home was a P1, I spend most of my free time playing with computers, I slowly buy older computers when i can but spend most of time using virtual machines to play around with things, I wish I could have experienced all these older machines when they were new, I use simh regularly(most interested in pdps, vaxes and altair from there so far), I use vice for commodores and I have an apple iie I use for anything I do with that, I took some electrical engineering courses and want to build an s-100 computer one day and design some chips for it but kinda buying pieces as I go. On the software side(since that’s what I can do with emulators), I have used most unix versions and have recently been teaching myself other DEC systems like RSX, RSTS and VMS. on the modern side I’ve been using linux since I was a kid when I realised Windows cost money that I didn’t have and even though I work on windows systems everyday I have never really liked it any newer then 3.1, always really like the various DOSes, I know basic programming skills but never really have made anything overly complex with coding. I know I’m jumping all over just trying to think of things to mention, I think of myself like a jack of all trades master of none sort of person and have always felt we should strive to do more with less in software development and much prefer having more control and less automation in programs, I spend alot of my time recently playing around with pdp11 emulation and just randomly stumbled upon this forum so I figured I’d join as it seems to be a place of people with likeminded interests and I’m sure my wife would love to hear less about my stories of how I just figured out to emulate some old system from 50 years ago in great details so a forum might be a better place to converse. So enough rambling sorry and hello.
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Hi, Im John … I live in UK my main interest is in Model Railways and Electronics and i’m 77, I did have a VIC 20 back in the day, but after seeing the various videos on Commadore 64 and other Retro computers I was hooked to build one for my Grandson for his 8th birthday in July 2025, I have already got a case and a keyboard, a Clone of the 407 board on order and when funds are available a kit of bits, but I have yet to find out which chips are missing, so may be an expensive build … Regards John Marshall
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Welcome John, and welcome Jason - and welcome also to other newcomers who might not yet have posted to this thread!
Started as an apprentice radio technician and the course included valve RADAR equipment. This used valve logic circuits. If you have a first generation computer, I’m qualified to maintain it. When taking some electronics subjects I asked for an exemption. Immediately handed last years final exam paper and told if I passed the exam I’d get my exemption. Had a HP-41C and for one question I wrote a program. Not a problem at that stage as the thinking was it would take longer to program a calculator than to use pen and paper. Passed and got my exemption. Decided to learn BASIC so took a short course that used mark sense cards with a PDP-8 EduSystem. No computer at home so I signed up with a commercial account at Control Data. This was in the era of KRONOS and SCOPE. Got taken into their storeroom and told to take whatever manuals I like. Basically if it wasn’t nailed down I took the manual. Later on I took a short course in COBOL at an institution that had a Cyber. When asked to write a program to implement a sort I took a shortcut and just called the SORT/Merge package, much less work. Played around with a SC/MP then SC/MP II. Built a VDU using TTL. Worked on CP/M systems which included implementation of software and hardware design of custom interfaces. Worst job was implementing hard sector and soft sector changeover of a Shugart SA800/801 drive as had to use TTL to switch from tristate to open collector disk controllers. Manager had quoted $200 for the job so no PCB for this job. A nightmare. Designed and built a trainer for a university, slipped in self-modifying code into the example program just because I could. Didn’t have to, just left it in as an exercise for the students… Performed hardware maintenance on PDP-11, VAXen and mainframe systems and all peripherals down to chip level. To get a mainframe disk pack drive up to temperature for a head alignment I left running the drive exerciser for too long and exercised the disk pack drive to heat death. Had to replace the drive transistors. Changed to material quality assurance role at a corporation. Job worked with a flat file sorted into part number order and I was told it was impossible to get it sorted into any other order. I was not permitted to write any programs on the company mainframe as I was not qualified to use a computer terminal. Eventually was placed on the Introduction to the Computer terminal short course. Once completed I qualified for an account on the mainframe. Wrote what I needed in COBOL and this was passed to our headquarters for use by staff in other States. Eventually my section was upgraded with an MP/M network. We were given a pad of 10 forms for reporting problems, bugs, etc. I submitted 90 to 100 bug reports. Because of the bug reports payment had not been made so the company came back with an offer to replace the system with a network of PCs. I recommended we take the offer of PCs but the managers decided to stay with MP/M. The system was used for contract records held in a relational database system (Dataflex). I had some experience with CDC’s TOTAL,.IS/Athena so at lunchtime I wrote programs for various sections in our building. Beware the feral programmer. Eventually they replaced the MP/M network with PCs and switched off MP/M. At that point the building basically came to a halt. The manager had the contract database converted but had not taken the trouble to ask the various sections what they needed. They had to run the two networks in parallel for 6 months until they could shutdown the MP/M network. Luckily I had transferred to another area so escaped any retribution. Became a LAN Administrator… and this has taken my story up to the late 1980s/early 90s.
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What an excellent story! I do like “feral programmer”! There’s no substitute for self-teaching with manuals - if you’ve the energy and interest to teach yourself.
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A lot of short courses plus training and work experience provided by various employers helped enormously. Other times it was just luck of the draw. Went to an interview where one of the managers was wearing a very low cut dress. If you talked to her breasts and not to her you were out. Think the only reason I landed that job was I talked to her. Other times I was sidetracked by the unexpected. In the past one of my roles had been a technical instructor teaching radio related subjects to adults. My wife at the time was a High School teacher so I applied for a computer related, student teaching role. One of the attractions would be our holidays would be synchronized. This was part time teaching computer related subjects and part time being a student at teachers college. What I didn’t know was they were also looking for somebody with radio qualifications. I’m successful then discover I’ve been selected to teach radio and electrical to High School students instead of computer related subjects to adults. They had a school with amateur (ham) radio equipment and the previous radio teacher had resigned. Found out the head of the schools electrical department was a disinterested linesman. I’d been hired to give this guy a good kick up the backside to force him to improve his methods. The syllabus was designed to bore the interested students to death. Programmed my HP41 to generate exam papers for each student. Easy to see who cheated and copied their neighbours answers. Had some very good answers unrelated to the question they were asked. The kids were great, he was a nightmare. Position did mean I had a reason to become a radio amateur, discovered why there was such a high turnover of staff, then I also resigned. This is also why I now qualify to be assigned 254 public IPv4 addresses for experimentation and self training on my home network. Amateur radio operators had the 44.0.0.0 IPv4, Class A subnet assigned in 1981, see 44Net for details.
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Okay, so why not.
I’m Dave… I’m either based in Bethany Beach, Delaware or Largo, Florida based on the time of year and, sometimes, where my wife decided she needed to go.
I started into computing around 1973. My Dad had brought home an HP9100b (or something similar) from his office at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ. He wanted it for “doing the taxes,” but he was letting me mess around with it otherwise. This calculator had core memory and stored programs on little cards. I played a few of the “games” like NIM… but got bored. Then I started taking them apart to figure out how they worked. And I wrote a few mods and a few of my own, before the calculator had to go back.
Shortly after that, I convinced my Dad to bring home a terminal on the weekends to let me use a real computer. They had a CDC Cyber 72 or something similar as his department’s computer – Bell Labs in Holmdel had so many computers, they supposedly had to run the A/C even in winter, in Jersey – and of course, no one was doing things on the weekend back then. So every Friday night he handed me a TI Silent 700 terminal and a roll of thermal paper. I got to “learn computers” – much of which was taking apart BASIC and FORTRAN programs I found there, as we didn’t actually have the manuals – until the paper ran out.
I spent some years learning computing: programming on the weekends, reading BYTE and Creative Computing and probably a few other less memorable ones every month.
At some point, Dad’s computer’s dialup went away… Bell had so many phone lines, just owning the 201-949 exchange wasn’t sufficient. So things were moving to internal switching. His system got moved, but it took him a few months to get me the details (imagine that – Dad, at the time in charge of the lightguide project at Bell, had other things to do besides getting me access to their mainframe again!). I stared doing, manually, what later became know as “war dialing” to find other computers. I did this on the weekend, to avoid people answering, and eventually found some logins. Most of them were prompts I didn’t even understand, but one was a simple “login:” prompt.
After a bunch of attempts, I got into that system – an early UNIX machine – with the login “joe”… no password! I started trying things at the UNIX prompt, most of which didn’t work, since of course, I only knew the CDC interface, and that one not even so well. Then I stumbled upon “ls” for listing things and “man” for manuals. Some month later, I had built a pretty good loose-leaf manual, all on thermal paper, of some early version of UNIX.
Of course, I kept up with the consumer computing world through magazines. Dad eventually got me back onto the CDC machine, and got me manuals… the function I had been trying to figure out wasn’t MID$() or some variation, but SUBSTR()… I had not found much good string coding in the programs I was taking apart!
In 1977, my best friend Scott and I went to Manhattan, with his Dad (owned a publishing company on Madison Ave), and sought out the one computer store that carried the Commodore PET 2001 computer. He had money from some relatives, and bought the PET. I immediately started learning PET BASIC and, from time to time, writing a bit of code on Scott’s machine.
But it was in 1979 that I really did it – thanks to an inheritance from my Grandfather, I was able to buy a home computer: the Exidy Sorcerer! Yeah, that’s about as obscure as 70s home computers get. I wanted a SOL-20 but they were too expensive. The Exidy could support 64x30 character output, but not so much on a standard TV. I tried regular video modulators, then UHF video modulators. Finally, I decided I’d do my own… but not a modulator. I went to a good electronics store in Lincroft, NJ and got the Sam’s Photofacts for the Hitachi 13" TV my Mom had given me, after the old clunker TV I had fixed up (new tubes) had finally failed. Turns out that one was perfect – the composite video signal was easy to find. I wired up a big toggle switch, ran the video though that, allowing either the TV’s video or my new source into the next stage of the TV. I got a high-speed transistor from Rat Shack and managed to work out, with lots of experimentation, a small video amplifier to match the output of the Exidy – and isolate it, of course – from whatever the TV wanted at my tap point.
I also took an old Rat Shack cassette tape deck, cut out some of the analog circuitry, added a 25-pin D-connector, and made it plug directly into the Exidy, which used the same port for RS-232 and cassette. I wrote programs for the Exidy, and ultimately sold two tapes worth to Creative Computing Software. The system wasn’t popular enough for that to be much cash, but as a summer job, I about doubled what I had made washing dishes in the summer of '78.
In fall of 1979, I went to college at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I started out in Electrical Engineering, then added Math/CS and Psychology to my major. We did mostly Pascal (with enhancements) on the engineering side, and LISP on the psychology side of things. I learned a few other languages in various classes, and did 6502 Assembly in one class… I already knew Z-80 from hand assembling code for the Exidy.
After college I started in the “Computational Design” group at General Electric in Philly. That was the only group in the company allowed to get our fingers on both hardware and software – they had put this weird well up, as if they were fundamentally different things, rather than two different approaches to the same system problem. Go figure.
After four months, I left – in particular, because they had me attached to a nuclear weapons project, not the Space Shuttle as promised, and also because the place was run by idiots. They thought human time was cheap and computer time was expensive, so they had dozens of engineers running hours long simulations on a single VAX 11/780. I was working on a new version of that simulation system, since I didn’t have a clearance, yet.
I jumped to Commodore in West Chester, PA… to make personal computers… my own frickin’ toys! I stared out on the “TED” project, which was intended as competition for the Sinclair ZX81 in the US, but also wound up competing with the C64, thanks to company politics.
The next project was the Commodore 128, a proper sequel to the C64. I specialized in working out the technical digital timing of the system, ensuring compatibility with C64 hardware (or figuring out what “they” did wrong, when was a third party device that failed, and early testing of the 8563 chip, or the “80 column chip” as everyone called it. Using only that chip let the C128 run mostly at 2.04MHz rather than 1.02MHz. It wasn’t crazy successful by Commodore 64 standards, only around 6 million sold, but given out meger resources, it was a good system.
I tried to come up with some interesting projects after that. Our lead on the C128, Bil Herd, left the company … the man had barely slept in 2+ years. So I was weirdly left as the top engineer in low-end systems at the age of 24. When all that failed, I was asked to help out on this new project: the Amiga 500. So I knew Amiga… when Bil had got a carefully guarded copy ot the big green Amiga book (eventually split up into the RKM series) I stayed late and photocopied the whole thing… then read it cover to cover over the weekend. So I was ready.
That lasted about two months. We were informed of the Amiga 2000 project in Germany, basically just put together with an Amiga 1000 design plus the “Zorro” expansion specs, modified to use PC-style card sizes rather than the original Amiga cards, which looked like tiny VME cards, pluggable from the outside of the box, connectors on the long edge, all those good things. The managers wanted George Robbins – our top high-end guy, but also the main systems guy on the Amiga 500 – to take on the A2000 and leave the A500 to me. But the A500 was George’s baby, and he didn’t want the A2000. So they gave me that.
Holy shit… they gave me that.
I didn’t understand it yet. But I got to work, George helped me a great deal. I also improved things by building a gate array for the bus controller – rather than another sea of PALs – and adding a “coprocessor protocol” to allow new processor cards to easily own the system. George and I both worked on turning the Germans’ “Genlock Slot” into the Video Slot, which made the Newtek Video Toaster possible. If you don’t know Video Toaster, go watch some episodes of Babylon 5 or Seaquest DSV. No one was doing large CGI television shows on anything else in the early 1990s.
After that, I worked on a series of processor cards for the A2000: the A2620 (a 14.3MHz 68020 + MMU + FPU started by Bob Welland) and the A2630 (that’s 68030 at 25MHz… I tired for 33Mhz, but there were issues), both with on-board 32-bit RAM.
My last and overall best full system at Commodore was the Amiga 3000. Unlike previous projects, there were lots of other engineers on this one: Hedley Davis, Greg Berlin, Scott Hood, Scott Schaeffer, and Jeff Boyer. I designed the basic system architecture and also the new Zorro III 32-bit expansion bus. This finally gave the Amiga 32-bit chip RAM, but also added dedicated 68030 DRAM with burst memory support. Greg Berlin and Scott Schaeffer also built a “tower” version of this.
I collaborated on the Amiga 4000 project, but it was mostly Greg Berlin, Scott Schaeffer, and maybe a few others. Here’s the thing: I had spent late 1990 into 1991 building a thing called the Amiga 3000+, which added the new Amiga “AGA” chips (we called it “Pandora” at the beginning, most folks at Commodore called them “AA” simply because we’d had the Advanced Amiga Architecture projecting going since 1988, and so this was [at least] one less “A”… I guess.
Since then, I’ve worked at and sometimes started multiple startup companies including Scala, PiOS AG/Metabox AG, Fortele, and Nomadio, everything but PiOS/Metabox in the Philly area. I’m currently working at Rajant Corporation, making mesh networking computers for rugged use. Some cool tech, but not retro-related.
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Fantastic intro @hazydave, thanks for that! (If anyone happens to have any follow-up questions (for anyone), please use a new thread and keep this one for intros and greetings.)
HI my names adrian im in a rather lonly part of the world to have this hobby in the smack dab midle of canada in manitoba theres couple guys in southern mb but im pritty remote in the north
i have a collection extending from heathkits to obscure soviet big iron
and a even more obscure system that flew in planes with radio equipment atached to them for testing for minerals i think maybe a usgs one off as well not sure has a motorola 6800 from 75
also got some phillips data systems relics from a model of the p1000
to core memory for a 800 series and a front panel and various manuals documents
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Main frames really dropped in size since I last looked. 
Nice see the whole set.
hahahaha good old sales models eh from about 1968 hell of an ebay find
Hello all–I am Stanley Mazor, computer architect, age 83, Los Altos, CA, USA.
designs include: Intel 4004, 8008, 8080, ~8086 some parts;
also 1965 Fairchild Symbol high level language hardware CPU,
for which I was a principal architect of the floating point and string
functional units. I also programmed in COBOL, Fortran, and a dozen
assembly languages on 6-7 mainframe and mini computers.
I have published ~40 articles on computers and architecture and
subjects cover a fair spectrum of issues of computer chips and
IC logic and design issues.
I worked at Fairchild, helped start Intel, and worked in CAD
mostly for 40 years…Silicon compier (died), and Synopsys, and a few more.
I just added as very small note on Symbol computer now to add
a couiple of small points on our work of 1966.
I owned at work about a dozen computers including PDP-10, PDP-8
and IBM 1130 and 1401, 1620 and a mix of 360/370 and a few more.
bye
stan
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Welcome Stan - thanks for your story, impressive experience!
And welcome Adrian, I do like those miniature marketing models!
Welcome Stan, it’s a honor to have you here. For my hobby programming I studied the 8080 extensively and read a lot about it, including your insightful retrospective paper Intel 8080 CPU Chip Development