5 posts were split to a new topic: The 4004 - in transistors, and perhaps as a tiny tapeout
Welcome Stan! Over the past 18 years, Iāve had the honor of āherdingā a highly capable group of ācatsā eager to explore and preserve details of the Intel 4004. Most recently my colleagues Klaus Scheffler, a physicist from Switzerland and Lajos Kintli, a mathematician from Hungary got discrete transistor versions of the 4004, 4002, and (slightly ācheatingā EPROM-based) 4001 fully working at 250kHz. I myself re-drew the original 4004 artwork from a pair of aligned photomicrographs, one stripped of metal using HF acid to reveal the transistors, then Lajos ran his netlist-to-layout comparison tool to catch my mistakes.
(Iāve moved some subsequent discussion of the 4004 adventures into a new thread:
The 4004 - in transistors, and perhaps as a tiny tapeout
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Hello!
Iām mainly here because I was given a pile of 80s and 90s computer hardware and I feel really bad to scrap it. I do want to get some money out of it because I am trying to teach myself how to microsolder and the funds will go to equipment for that. Mainly after a bench power supply and microscope right now. Iāll be posting stuff in the appropriate category shortly.
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Here is just a small sample of my work. Started as a 15 year old apprentice radio technician in nav aids, radar, etc., for civil aviation. Ended up as a technical instructor. Because of my antiquity the valve based radar systems included digital logic so my training wouldāve qualified me to work on first gen systems. As it was the earliest mainframe hardware I ever worked on was second generation Burroughs.
PCs didnāt exist and the only way for a technician to get time on computers were short courses at night school. First course was BASIC on a PDP-8 using Mark Sense cards.
To get more time I signed up for a business account with Control Data as you only had to pay for your runtime. This was the Kronos/SCOPE era. Business account so they lead you into the storeroom and say take whatever manuals you want. Which I did, thank you very much. Later on did a COBOL short course on a Cyber systems and one assignment was to sort data. Had the Cyber COBOL and Sort/Merge manuals so that provided a very simple and unexpected solution for the teacher.
Moved into CP/M hardware and software support which included some custom design work. Then PDP-11 and VAXen hardware maintenance followed by Burroughs B6700 hardware support down to chip level.
Donāt go on your tea break leaving the disk exerciser warming up a disk drive for a head alignment. The cooling of the final drive transistors is marginal, you get to repair the the disk drive you have just cooked and then get to do the head alignment.
At home started with a SC/MP then upgraded to a Motorola 6800D2 kit with teletype. This was followed by various PDP-11 systems (PTS, CAPS-11, RT-11 RSX11-M. Some people get offended when you bought their old hardware at auction for less than their monthly maintenance charge. Then VAXen, Alphas and other DECsystems.
Obviously as a 15 year old I never completed High School so I went back to night school and thought Computer Science would be a simple subject. At home I had VMS licenced with Fortran, etc. Not so simple, the school didnāt have access to a computer system for students and it was all pseudo code, paper flowcharts, etc.
Did some teaching then assembly line work doing the repair of processor boards for small branch exchange systems. I was screwed over a promotion so resigned on the Friday and was working for the Telco on the Monday as Quality Assurance Officer. Upset the company no end as I knew how they had fed defective boards into systems, etc. Also glad to see two people were now required to do my work.
The lab where I worked used a flat file on a mainframe and I was told it was impossible to sort it into any other order. I couldnāt do anything until I was qualified to use a computer terminal. Sent on the short course to qualify to use a terminal and when completed I was given my own account. Some COBOL and I had what I needed, then it was distributed to the rest of the nation.
Time to upgrade the site and management had the opportunity to network CP/M or PCs. I recommended PCs and management decided on CP/M (there is more to that story). Company was not going to do anything for the staff so I became a feral programmer. Writing relational database applications for different members of staff at lunch time. I moved on to Building Management Systems. I heard from staff when they finally replaced the old network with PCs and tried to switched off the old system the place ground to a halt as people were dependant on my apps. Believe it took about 6 months of systems running in parallel. Appears managers didnāt know what their staff actually required to do their work.
Moved sideways into LAN Admin. I wanted to stay technical and not become an administrative manager. When I wouldnāt apply for a promotion they selected a person of somewhat limited abilities as my manager. Doesnāt pay to have a screaming fit in the photocopier room when your subordinate wonāt break licence limits and upper management gets to hear the commotion. Tends to sour relationships. Years later he became my manager again. We were running Word 2 when Word 6 macro viruses were an issue. My recommendation was donāt migrate until we have a solution, of course that was ignored and whole floors became plague spots. At least that manager left for greener pastures, god help the next company. Which rewinds me, a Novell Lan administrator was going on leave so he gave everybody administrator rights. Needless to say another plague spot we had to clean up.
Eventually doing second/third level support which meant I caught the nasty, long jobs with obscure solutions which I would then write up solutions. Next round of redundancies and my job times look bad. Iām made redundant and move to another area doing systems documentation. While writing up systems found a root server locked away in a steel cabinet that had been forgotten. Another year or two and it was going to hit a hard limit. Life would have got very interesting for some if an undocumented root server had died. It was just coincidence all managers over 40 years old were made redundant. Brought my manager along to the interview where I was to be told why I was redundant just for his entertainment. Years later I was still receiving assistance requests because of my name attached to solutions. No administrator access, unable to assist, so not my problem. Resisted all attempts to be made a manager and eventually retired decades ago.
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Great to read your tale. Not going to elaborate here - too much legal liability - but so very parallel to much of my experiences - 15 year old tech apprentice in the 1950ās - teaching by age 19, crappy managers and management practices think HR before it was called that or even DEI! Innumerable ignored/over-ridden technical recommendations - adversarial died-in-the-wool jobs-worths that, young, had entered a particular sector (e.g. banking, health, defence) and successfully proved the Peter Principle at every level. Just one example - no names - proposed up-grade of bankās systems - estimated as Ā£70M, actually Ā£340M - and that excluded impact costs of delays, training, functional failures. Today of course they would get a knighthood or other āgongsā, move on and take a multi-million leaving package for their silence. We need a great many more like Mr (now Sir) Bates - former Post Office manager, to call the charlatans out.
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Absolutely! Always good to hear how people got started and what different things they saw.
Just a friendly note from one of your mods: can we please hold ourselves back a bit if tempted to rant. By all means compose a post freely, but have a look at it before pushing the button, and see what kind of conversation it might be leading to. Thereās a lot that can be said about management and about procurement, but letās see how it relates to retrocomputing, to computer history. If thereās something there that might be of interest, perhaps better to start a new thread, gather some materials, and frame a productive discussion.
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My apologies if the truth seems like a rant - my post was in support of the original post, confirming that his experiences were like mine and that there is much that has affected the pathway to products and problems in the history of IT.
Hello,
Sorry for having missed this thread. I went out to post some things beforeā¦ sorry.
I am a collector from Andorra and a researcher of the IBM System/23 Datamaster. I have the goal to leave as many units working as possible, erase all wrong information and correct the data, as well as preserve the units, its firmware and its software. I want to create a community of owners too.
Thank you for having me there!
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Greetings, all. I just bought myself an IBM PS/2 Model 25 on eBay because I learned touch typing on one in high school way back in the day and just wanted to have one.
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Hi Everyone. I just signed up. I have some S-100 questions and photos I hope to post soon.
Just wanted to Introduce myself.
Iām currently building my own relay computer based on the excellent work done by Paul Law and Prof. Harry Porter. Iām adding my own twists to it, my machine will be 12-bit (Data and Address bus) for example.
Would love to chat with anyone who has built, is building, or has any knowledge or interest in this kind of madness!
I appreciate relay computers may be too retro even for this forum! 
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Welcome, Peter, and also welcome to other newcomers.
Iām interested and Iām sure Iām not the only one - please feel free to start a new thread! (I can adjust threading of things but itās a little tricky)
Yes, I must second Edās comment. Please create a thread and tell us a little more about it. There is plenty of interest in relay computers, and your fear of being ātoo retroā is entirely misplaced! 
Hello everyone,
Iām andreax from Italy, and my journey with computers started in 1985 with a ZX Spectrum+.
I quickly fell in love with programming in BASIC.
Then came the Highscreen 386 SX, and I moved into Pascal, Assembler (z80/x86), and later C.
I tried several different operating systems: MS-DOS 5, Windows 3.1, OS/2, Minix and in 1994, I discovered Slackware Linux distribution.
Iāve been using Linux ever since. That was the moment I knew programming would be my path in life.
Over the years, Iāve built a small collection of vintage machines, including a Commodore 64, Apple II, 8086, and 286.
I love digging through old documentation to understand not just how, but why operating systems were implemented the way they were.
Iām also passionate about emulating old systems. When I discover a new system, I try to write a program for reading (and possibly writing) to its disks. Itās my way of understanding how things work.
My open source projects are available on GitHub https://github.com/andreax79/
Happy to be here!
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Hello, Iām Christopher, a long-time lurker. Started my computing life on the TRS-80 Model I back in 1977āish, but my undying love for the original Commodore Amiga (pre ā1000ā moniker) stands uncontested through the years (though my old Mac IIvx running BeOS is a close second).
Mostly, my retrocomputing hobby consists of breaking down historically significant software and rebuilding it from first principles in Pico-8 (itch link down below). So I do a lot of reading, research, and so on; itās an endlessly fascinating subject to me. I even built a bubble universe toy a couple of years ago (discovered on this very forum; yeah, Iāve been lurking for a while) in Pico-8 which captures the mood surprisingly well in 15 colors and 128x128 pixels. Itās called Pirouette (canāt link it, so ā lexaloffle. com/bbs/?tid=54517).
I finally stopped lurking because I feel I have something to contribute back to the community. Iāve soft-launched a blog I think youāll find interesting, called āStone Tools.ā Unlike a lot of retrocomputing blogs which focus on games or specific hardware, Iām doing hands-on, in-depth looks at the productivity software for the era 1977-1995 (roughly speaking). I donāt talk at all about games, so that probably weeds out 95% of retrocomputing enthusiasts, but the remaining 5% might be very excited by this project. Iām nothing if not niche.
The current post introduces the site, its tone, its goals, and gives a flavor of my style. The first full post will go live before the end of the week.
At any rate, itās a pleasure to finally introduce myself and meet you all.
- Stone Tools blog
- itch.io projects
- On GitHub as
ChristopherDrum
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Welcome @ChristopherDrum, Iām definitely in the 5% of retrocomputing enthusiasts who are very excited about a new non-game resource. Iāve subscribed to your RSS feed, looking forward to reading you.
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By the way, I love your blogās name.
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Thank you for your interest and kind words on the blog title. During this first couple of days, Iāve been heartened by the early response from people who share this interest; more than one has said, āI thought I was the only one!ā so I hope you enjoy it.
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Mind you, I do often read material about game technology, market, history, and everything other than game dynamics or gameplay. But in the retrocomputing space thereās a major lack of resources and writings on non-game software.
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