Introduce yourself thread

Welcome Kyle! Is that Ben Eater’s breadboard 6502 you’re building? It sounds like your retro-journey is similar to mine, except you’re further along it than I am.

Yeah that’s the one. I’ve only done the first part of the clock circuit so far though. Been focusing on the 8800 clone lately.

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Hi,
I am Dré Jansen, retired maintenance technician.
I live in the Netherlands in a village close to Rotterdam.
Hobbies building robots, 3D drawing and printing.

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Welcome! And thanks for the introduction.

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The first computer that I worked with was a Zilog MCZ 1/20 microcomputer with a 2MHz Z80 and 64Kb RAM. A pretty sophisticated machine at the time.

I began university studying Computational Science (sort of computer studies with maths) in 1978 at the University of Hull in the UK. We learnt to program in Pascal using punched cards and a batch system on an ICL 1904S mainframe. A year later we were allowed to use out departmental minicomputer - a PR1ME 300 running Primos using CRT terminals. The 300 dies during a fire and was replaced with a PR1ME 450.

I left university to work for Plessey Telecommunications on Edge Lane, Liverpool working on the System X telephone exchanges. I lasted about 3 months before the family business called me home. We used micro and minicomputers to typeset large educational texts such as dictionaries, encyclopaedias and directories.

We started to use Xenix, then Unix and finally Linux to batch paginate these texts using the program troff with some local modifications. Our programs were used to typeset dictionaries for Collins, HarperCollins, Cassell, Macmillan, Bonnier and a host of other large publishers.

Out company fell victim to the price-cutting war between the UK printing and publishing industry and the Indial and Chinese manufacturers. I’m sorry to sat thay price won over style and craftsmanship and our company became unsustainable.

I now work for the NHS - I love my job but miss the excitement and ground breaking nature of those early days of my career.

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Welcome! I’m sure I speak for many of us when I say I’d love to hear more about early mini- and microcomputer typesetting in a professional environment!

Hiya Les — one of your very happy former clients here. I was one of the computer guys at Collins dictionaries, up until 2002 when I moved to Canada. We kind of knew you used troff, but assumed your shop ran almost entirely on magic. I mean, the way you set the combined Dictionary & Thesaurus was gobsmackingly clever.

(For those who don’t quite nerd out to computer typesetting as we might: a page of the Collins D&T looks like this:


It synchronizes dictionary entries above the line with thesaurus entries below the line. Sure, it’s a very special case of footnotes (perhaps; only Les knows), but keeping this in sync is no trivial task.)

Cost management in print publishing in the early 2000s made no sense, and the margins were squeezed in all the wrong places. For a small dictionary intended for the market in India, it was cheaper for HarperCollins (near Glasgow, Scotland) to:

  1. Buy paper from Finland and ship it to Scotland;
  2. Ship paper from Scotland to India;
  3. Have the books printed and bound in India;
  4. Ship the books back to Scotland;
  5. When orders came in, ship the books from Scotland to India as needed

than to either have the whole process carried out in India, or use the printing plant literally next door to HarperCollins’ building.

cheers,
Stewart

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Well hi Stewart - it’s been a long time! Hope you’re doing well and enjoying life in Canada.

We did make some beautiful books, didn’t we? I loved the challenges presented by yourselves at HarperCollins and all of the other publishing teams that we worked with.

The dictionary and thesaurus projects were a particular joy. If you are interested, here’s how the magic happened…

The data arrived as two files - the dictionary text and the thesaurus text. We extracted the headword lists for these and sorted the two files into alphabetic order, so that the dictionary headword was followed immediately by the thesaurus headword (if there was one - not all dictionary headwords had a corresponding thesaurus headword).

After reconstituting the data into one file the text was processes. Dictionary headwords went into one typesetting stream (diversion in troff parlance) and the thesaurus headwords went into the other. The remaining white space on the page was monitored and if either a dictionary entry or thesaurus entry exceeded the available space, it was split and the overflow moved to the next page. The page was then output, dictionary text first and split into columns, followed by the designed text that separated the dictionary entries from the thesaurus entries and then the thesaurus text split into columns. Finally, the page livery was output, including running heads, folios and any running foot text. The process started again for the next page, until the entire text was output.

Initially, when our typesetting system was running on Intel 80486 computers, we started a pagination run as we left the office on an evening, to find paginated text waiting for us the next morning (providing nothing went wrong overnight). As technology evolved and processors became faster, we could paginate in real-time. A 500 page book would take about ten minutes to half an hour. The last time I used our typesetting system (in 2010 approximately) it would paginate a 1000 page text in less than a minute. On today’s hardware, I reckon it would be virtually instantaneous.

And therein lay our problems - we made what we did look too easy and it was hard to justify (no pun intended!) the amount that we charged - which wasn’t a vast amount - with what we provided to the customer, which was usually a CD-ROM of PDF pages ready for the Computer-To-Plate process done by the printer. It came down to perceived value – a CD-ROM didn’t look as expensive or work-intensive as a stack of film, bromide or paper. We couldn’t actually reflect how much investment in equipment and resources we had made. For example, our first typesetter cost twice as much as my first house – you would be looking at around £400,000 in today’s money. Our first 28Mb (Megabyte!!) hard drive cost £20,000 second hand.
Still, happy days and exciting times. Everything needed to be invented and I learned a lot about software and hardware and how to bring them together, how to build systems that people could use and how to optimise processes to reduce cost and increase profitability.

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Hey!
My name is Alistair, I’ve been playing with retro kit since before it was retro. I have love for lots of 8-bit machines, such as the BBC Micro, Apple II and Atari 800 and many other classics, to 16 bit like the first IBM PC. My life has been peppered with UNIX, so I’m also a big fan of anything Linux/UNIX. I run a channel over on YouTube called Al’s Geek Lab ( https://www.youtube.com/alsgeeklab ) where I cover mostly retro stuff, but also occasionally open source and infosec stuff too.
I also have a keen interest on Bulliten Board Systems, and even decided to start up my own one recently (bbs.alsgeeklab.com:2323). Most of my work these days goes into getting old computers to do stuff they were never designed to do, such as go online. I like to push them to the absolute limits of what is possible, whilst still keeping true to their original machines as possible. Plenty of examples of that on my YouTube videos. So you’ll probably find me here helping out with DOS era stuff mainly, as well as asking questions about things like multi-tasking in DOS, or how to get Arachne web browser to work well… :slight_smile:

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Welcome, and thanks for joining us!

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Hi, I am Neal. My introduction to electronics was taking apart defunct valve radios to scavenge components (usually tuning capacitors and speakers). I built a Sinclair Micromatic radio (and it worked). Fast forward to my early teenage years and, after many months of saving from a weekend job with Dad, I bought, built and debugged a NASCOM 2, which I later expanded with memory and disks. My final year project at university included the then recently-announced CMOS 6502. All of my working life has been spend in various electronics jobs, including about 10 years working for DEC (involved in wide-area networking, then Alpha processors and finally StrongARM). I am currently employed as a chip designer, designing CMOS image sensors (aka cameras).

Grant Searle’s “multicomp” design kindled my interest in retrocomputing. I built the 6809 version of his design, then expanded and evolved it in various ways and ported all sorts of old software (FLEX, CamelForth, NitrOS-9) and new software (Fuzix) to it.

A leaking water tank in my parents’ house a few years ago prompted me to finally reclaim my NASCOM from my childhood bedroom and bring it back to life. Since then, I have been distracted with various expansion projects for that machine: a virtual tape expansion and virtual disk expansion called “nascom_sdcard” and, most recently, a single-board homage called “NASCOM 4” which is half FPGA and half 74-series logic.

All of my projects can be found on github and, like many others here, I’m also a member of various other retro groups.

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Welcome Neal! I believe we’ve met once, at an event in Cambridge at the CCH. And I’ve met your code for sure - your 6809 model. Thanks for sharing!

My name is Ladislau Szilagyi, I’m 67.
Back in 1978, as a programmer, I was allowed to use a computer named PDP-11, built by the late Digital Equipment Corporation, using RSX-11M as operating system. This was one of the first good multitasking, real-time operating systems ever designed.
Also, my job included programming an INTEL 8080 based computer.
I managed to write for this INTEL 8080 computer a small kernel (less than 8 Kbytes), containing multitasking support, I/O drivers (on interrupts) for the real-time clock, serial console, digital and analog inputs/outputs, punched paper tape (!) reader, etc.
It was used in Romania until the late 80’s in various industrial projects.
Since then, I worked in almost all the possible roles in a software project: programmer, project manager, architect, business analyst, requirements engineer, tester, test manager. In the last 15 years, I was involved in training, for testers and business analysts.
I am a big fan of Z80 computers.
regards,
Ladislau

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Hello Ladislau,

I read with interest your post. I am interested on the history of “eastern block” computing during socialist era. If you have any personal stories you want to share, facts, links, books, please let me know at islaind
at yahoo
co uk

Eds, sorry for hijacking this but could not find Ladislau’s email elsewhere.

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One should also feel free to post personal histories and recollections here too! (In a new topic, of course.)

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Hi everyone!
I have been interested in retro-computing and vintage computers since the early '80s.

I love coding for these systems.
I have written several BASIC games and competed in a few BASIC 10-liner competitions:

and many others (I cannot post more than 2 links)

but my largest project is Cross-Lib:

which is a universal 8-bit development framework that supports about 200 consoles, computers and other devices.

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Welcome! Thanks for starting a thread about Cross Lib
Cross-Lib: a universal framework to code on 200 8-bit vintage systems

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Hi, I’m a UK-based nerd just joined here… My computing journey started with a friend’s Commodore PET and the family ZX81. Through the 80s it was the usual UK home micros - Spectrum, C64, QL, Atari ST (my one and only published game on that one), and from the 90s onto PCs and low-end Unix (SGI/Sparc/DEC pizzaboxes) stuff for school and work. My first job was writing database-driven websites for that new-fangled www, in 1994, served off BSDi systems, along with a Pipeline service. These days I work for cloud services of various kinds.

I tend to have a big backlog of slow-moving projects, in the programming, low-skill electronics and 3d printing realms. Currently: CAD and 3d print my own vt100 with a correctly laid out USB keyboard, and various retrogaming and Arduino/FPGA things.

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Hello I am Patrick, a Computer Technician since 1986, first introduced to the world of computing on a TRS-80 Model 3 in 1982, I enjoy restoring old units, making them purr once again and if someone wants it for their collection or personal use, they can acquire it. I dabble in 3D Printing to restore broken components, I run a little web hobby site called “Texas Tandy Restorations” https://www.texastandyrestorations.org/ I am mostly focused on the TRS-80 Line products with extension to Tandy PC Compatible and later hardware.

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Welcome, Patrick! (Also also welcome, @AnotherHowie!)