[ale] When I was young

[Scott Castaline]

  On 08/18/2010 04:04 PM, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> All those computers came with an enclosure!  How can you call yourself
> an early adopter?
>
> I got my first computer by getting the plans to a radioshack color
> computer and then buying parts from Delta Electronics on Buford
> Highway.  (There also used to be an electronic store across the street
> from Delta where I bought parts, but I don't recall the name.)
>
> I bread boarded the whole thing the winter/spring of '80, but I never
> got it to run. :(    But it was just a fun project to try and build it
> anyway.
This reminds me of my experiment in the early 60's, it wasn't a computer 
obviously, but my father had bought a new HiFi Stereo Amp by Bose. It 
was when schematics were included and it got my curiosity going. There 
was a TV/Electronics shop down the street from my father's office, so 
one day he took me there and the owner spent some time explaining the 
meaning of the symbols in the schematics as well as interpreting values 
and how changing values impacted in sound/performance of the amp. He had 
all of the tubes as wells a slew of resistors, capacitors and inductors 
that I needed to build my own. He had also had a metal chassis for tubes 
that I was able to utilize. It took a while I don't remember how long 
but finally got it built. Forgot to mention that he also had the pots 
that I need for bal. bass, treble, mid-range and vol. He had also 
allowed me to build it at his shop, (he was a friend or patient of my 
father) so when done I bought it home, my mother took one look and 
thought it was something from some bad SciFi Horror movie. I hooked up 
my father's turntable and speakers to it and it played well for about 30 
min. The sound was comparable to the Bose, my father thought the bass 
was better. After 30 min. we started to smell something burning and 
found that some of the wiring under the tubes were actually smoldering. 
That was the end of my experimentation for a while.
> fyi: By '84 or '85 I had designed a intelligent 8-port uart card for
> the S-100 bus.  It was Motorola 68010 based.  I got that working, but
> by then I was charging for my time not just having fun.  I think I
> built about 30 of those 8-port cards and sold them to Delta to link
> there reservation centers together.  I had to write a SLIP like
> protocol to get the networking to work.  (I don't think the SLIP
> protocol existed yet, or if it did I didn't know about it.)
>
> The main computer OS was UNIX of some flavor so half the SLIP logic
> was in kernel and half was off-loaded to the intelligent uart card.
> ie. It was what they call a TOE design these days.
>
> Greg
>