A better title would be “So what’s on my workbench or the latest thing I’m working on?”
Jason Follows His Destiny
This is what happens to an 11 year old with two software engineers as parents. Jason was being nudged to try programming, and since he loves his iPod touch, that seemed like a natural place to get started. Getting an iPhone app running is a tad more complicated than the first 5 or 6 line BASIC program I wrote back in the 70s, but he had lots of help. His friends were very impressed. Since this, he’s written a bit more complex apps with several buttons that update UITextView windows. He now uses Interface Builder so it’s easier to do the UI portion.
The Workbench
My employer was getting rid of some excess lab benches, so I got one and finally have a much better work bench:
Lots of parts in containers, drawers, scattered all over:
Resistors, caps and misc passive devices:
If you need any 7400 series chips, let me know... I’ve got thousands of them, along with many parts from the late 70s and 80s.
S-100 Lives!
I used to look at computer magazines in the 70s thinking “some day I’ll have a nice S-100 system with one of those killer Z80 processors!” I’ve collected parts, thinned the collection, re-collected stuff, gave it away, and finally got serious a few years ago. My system consists of an unknown motherboard I bought from a fellow member of MARCH, a Northstar Z80 CPU board, CCS serial and memory cards, and a VersaFloppy disk controller. The 64K memory board and serial board were both bought “new” from Anchor Electronics (download the catalog and look on page 5) in Silicon Valley and I collected parts and built them both. For those who don’t remember computing in the S-100 era, you could usually buy blank boards, kits, assembled, and burned-in. Ie, you could buy a board that was built and quickly tested, OR spend more and get one that had been tested for a few days in a live system. I’ve got a new IDE hard drive controller board on order. It’s great that people are making S-100 boards again!
I still haven’t gotten the CP/M BIOS running but I’m slowly working on it. The serial board has four ports, so I figure once I get CP/M running, my next project will be to get BDS C installed and then write a multi-user game using old green-screen terminals.
For those observant hams reading this, note the Warbler PSK transceiver, the Heath SB-610 monitor scope, and the Amp Supply LK-550 amp.