Welcome, Benjamin, and welcome, Steve. What a marvellous variety of experience we have here. Maybe it’s time for a thread to show off our favourite things.
I’m one of the guys that lurked the Google+ Group, and would even post once every few years! Glad to see the group, at least in part, successfully migrated.
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I saw Ed’s post over on 6502.org and signed up. Finished discobot’s challenge just now.
A compressed presentation:
- Electronics and digital education back in the seventies
- Started on AIM-65 somewhen around 78-79
- At the same time I used a mini (paper tape, core memory, tty) at school, got my key so I spent many weekends there.
- Started working with ND minicomputers from around 1982, and also Apple II and clones at the same time (all part of the job). Z80 too. I wish I had been quick enough when the nice Basis-108 (Apple II clones with 128KB RAM and built-in Z80, dual Apple-CP/M systems) were dumped.
- Unix, and, from '92, Linux experience, up to the present.
- Main interest is ND computers. I’ve got a 16-bit one at home (wish I had the 32-bit one too), and I wrote emulators for them. Still not fully complete though.
- As for micros, I’ve done much more 6502 assembly programming than Z80, although I worked more with CP/M than Apple DOS.
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I’d love to hear more about those Norsk Data machines, we don’t hear much about them here in the States.
Funnily enough an ND machine showed up earlier today while I was grepping my G+ backups… I’ll give @Tor a chance to post first!
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Feel free, Ed, I’m short of time at the moment and will not be able to write up anything soon.
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Oops, it was a mistake. I don’t have a Norsk Data post to resurrect!
I lived in the US (Virginia) from 1970 to 1975 (ages 8 to 13) before moving back to Brazil and really wanted to build my own computer. But the information in the encyclopedia was too superficial and the books I found in the library were so bad they set me back instead of helping. The $29 “Digital Electronic Computer Kit” from Radio Shack (really just switches, wires and lamps) helped a little, while I missed the revolution happening on the other side of the country.
My father went through a series of programmable calculators in the second half of the 1970s and I learned programming on them. Later, magazines allowed me to learn Basic and 8080 assembly though I didn’t have any machines to see if my programs would actually work. For my high school science fair I designed a video game around the Signetics chipset (also used in the Emerson Arcadia 2001 and other consoles) but ended up building the reference design from Signetics modified for PAL/M by Ibrapi instead. Right before the fair they gave me two game ROMs, which saved the demo since I was unable to find anyone to “burn” EPROMs for me.
In 1980 (my first year at the university) I got to use the Burroughs B6700 and my father was given an old 6800 development kit that the local Motorola office was throwing away. I developed a customer database on my uncle’s Fluke 1720A computer (a fun machine with a TMS9900 processor, bubble memory, touch screen in a sewing machine form factor) to get the money for the power supply parts for the MEK6800D2.
In 1982 I got a US Sinclair ZX81 but later replaced it with a TI99/4A. I had been building a Z80 computer (similar to the later MSX machines) and then a simple 68000 computer to develop software on. In 1983 I started a children’s computer project with the same chipset as the TRS-80 Color Computer, as shown in my album and higher resolution photos.
The basic TI99/4A was too limited for serious software development, so in 1984 I built my own Apple II clone using a board from Microcraft.
In 1986 I got a 128K Macintosh that I upgraded to 512K and in 1987 I reprogrammed the PALs in Unitron’s Mac clone to make it 20% faster than the original. I still have that clone and a few other machines.
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Wow! I hope you feel motivated to post a thread about your Merlin series. (That 6800 dev board - I think I used something very similar, briefly, at university.)
The Merlin computers were only prototypes (there was one Merlin 1, three Merlin 2, an unfinished Merlin 3 and two Merlin 4) but as they were similar to the Tektronix 4404 from another thread I suppose they could be interesting to people here. Too bad the project log is in Portuguese.
I’ll either add information on the Tek thread or start a new one in the proper category.
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I am about somewhere here 
Started on Spectrum ZX81, then 48, Commodore, Amiga, IBM PC… the rest is really history. My forte is to make devices connect to the internet that were never intended.
Not a fan of emulators! I prefer real hardware
Richard
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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! 
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. 
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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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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. 
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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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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