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Reliving my (computer) childhood. — Parallax Forums

Reliving my (computer) childhood.

Wandering through some old threads while working on a small wire wrap project got me thinking back to my early days of computing. Like IMSAI 8080 days. I used to use a program called Wiremaster to create wirelists for wrapping my Z80 projects (anyone play with the three voltage dynamic ram? The Z80 made using dynamic almost as easy as static.) and while (#%&$^$*) the IMSAI is long gone, I still have that particular package in the garage somewhere. Deeply somewhere. So, a bit of googling (yep, google really can be your friend) and I found not only a number of CP/M emulators including one that even gives you a working IMSAI, but Wiremaster as well. And it works very well. Just have to either remember the source syntax or take a deeeeeeeeeep dive into the garage to find the manual (most were paper in those days, only a readme on the disks). It was a long and very fun night getting all the pieces and parts together and making them run. There was an emulator that runs just fine in linux, a couple that do well under dosbox, played with them all. ahhhhh, back in the day.........
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Comments

  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    Ah, the joy of wire wrap.

    You can also run CP/M on the Propeller with my Zicog Z80 emulator. Or there is Pullmoll's Z80emulator for the Prop, qz80.
  • I got rid of most of my electronic stuff back in the early 80's. And that stuff now would be fun to have, like wire wrap. Any of it could probably be replaced, if you look long and pay the high price. But a void would still be there, home made power supplys and other things that were made out of necessity, can not br replaced.

    Frank, hold on to those memories. There are sure fun to look back on, and more fun to get hands on.
  • kwinnkwinn Posts: 8,697
    MikeDYur wrote: »
    I got rid of most of my electronic stuff back in the early 80's. And that stuff now would be fun to have, like wire wrap. Any of it could probably be replaced, if you look long and pay the high price. But a void would still be there, home made power supplys and other things that were made out of necessity, can not br replaced.

    Frank, hold on to those memories. There are sure fun to look back on, and more fun to get hands on.

    Home made power supplies and other items can still be built if someone wants to do so. Transformers, rectifiers, capacitors, and other components are readily available.
  • kwinn wrote: »
    Home made power supplies and other items can still be built if someone wants to do so. Transformers, rectifiers, capacitors, and other components are readily available.



    It would never be like the original. My 5v supply was totally made of parts from Radio Shack, except the cabinet. The LM309K was proudly mounted on the front of the cabinet, with a slide switch and a red incandescent pilot lamp.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    It would never be like the original.

    My first power supply put out 350 volts (and 6.3 volts for heaters). It used tube rectifiers and a mercury vapor voltage regulator. Built on a home made aluminium chassis. It was a heavy beast.

    There is no way I'm doing all that work again!


  • MikeDYurMikeDYur Posts: 2,176
    edited 2017-06-18 19:32
    Heater. wrote: »
    It would never be like the original.

    My first power supply put out 350 volts (and 6.3 volts for heaters). It used tube rectifiers and a mercury vapor voltage regulator. Built on a home made aluminium chassis. It was a heavy beast.

    There is no way I'm doing all that work again!



    If we are lucky, we kept all that old equipment boxed up somewhere. The next best thing is a picture. Other than that all we have is memories.
    Luckily all I'm forgetting is recent things. :lol:
  • MikeDYurMikeDYur Posts: 2,176
    edited 2017-06-18 23:45
    Like forgetting to attach the photo:
  • Heater. wrote: »
    It would never be like the original.

    My first power supply put out 350 volts (and 6.3 volts for heaters). It used tube rectifiers and a mercury vapor voltage regulator. Built on a home made aluminium chassis. It was a heavy beast.

    There is no way I'm doing all that work again!

    Yep, can't forget about those uhm, heaters.....


  • I'm sorry but I never had the necessity or desire to do anything tube type. I worked with them in the mid 70's, but never a desire to build with them.
    Just a slightly different era I imagine. I did have a tube TV monitor I converted once.
  • kwinnkwinn Posts: 8,697
    MikeDYur wrote: »
    kwinn wrote: »
    Home made power supplies and other items can still be built if someone wants to do so. Transformers, rectifiers, capacitors, and other components are readily available.



    It would never be like the original. My 5v supply was totally made of parts from Radio Shack, except the cabinet. The LM309K was proudly mounted on the front of the cabinet, with a slide switch and a red incandescent pilot lamp.

    Guess I'm not generally the sentimental type. About the only regret I have is getting rid of the last Z80 system I had. Made a terminal style case that had a complete system in it. Computer, keyboard, monitor, dual floppies, and power supply in an aluminum housing that was as well or better made than any commercial product at the time. Countersunk mounting screws smoothed over with body filler, sanded, and spray painted at an auto paint shop. Went all out on that one.
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,069
    Heater. wrote: »
    It would never be like the original.

    My first power supply put out 350 volts (and 6.3 volts for heaters). It used tube rectifiers and a mercury vapor voltage regulator. Built on a home made aluminium chassis. It was a heavy beast.

    There is no way I'm doing all that work again!


    Before micros, built a 6V DC (1958 VW had 6V system) to 400V 100mA inverter to power the final transmit tube in my 2m (146MHz) ham transceiver. Felt the full blast of this when I got hooked between it while tuning it up ;) Pulled the whole shebang onto the floor to get unhooked :(
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2017-06-19 03:09
    MikeDYur,
    I'm sorry but I never had the necessity or desire to do anything tube type.
    Yeah, I can understand that.

    It was just an accident of timing. When I was 12 or so my friend's dad was some kind of contractor that had been installing transmitters for those new fangled color TV channels all around the world. I was also a HAM radio guy. For a year or so we had a bit of an electronics club going on at his house, every Saturday he would teach us some electronics. Volts, amps, ohms, capacitance, inductance, tubes, resonant circuits, radio waves, modulation, detection etc. Eventually a few of us kids ended up building radio receivers from parts in his junk box. A magical time.

    Then he and his family disappeared to Australia to install some more transmitters...

    Wondering what to do next I discovered the local HAM radio club and signed up there. Those old guys were still mostly using tubes. But one day a guy turned up to give a presentation on the even more new fangled digital logic. With 7400 series chips. That sent me down a different rabbit hole. Resulting in my digital clock with Nixie tubes when I was 15 or so. And eventually to tinkering with micro-processors when we could get our hands on them in 1976.

    After all these decades I have finally migrated to FPGA and Verilog. Should have done that years ago.

    I like to tinker with tubes from time to time still. Love the glow of those heaters! A mercury vapor rectifier is a beautiful thing. When you are messing with huge U19 rectifier tubes and big capacitors at 1500 volts electronics gets, well, interesting!
    http://www.r-type.org/exhib/aai0146.htm

    aai0146.jpg





  • There is an Altair kit out there for the diehard retro guy. Always fun to build a retro machine
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2017-06-19 07:14
    Me, I want one of these Z80 kits.
    https://www.tindie.com/products/Semachthemonkey/rc2014-mini-single-board-z80-computer-kit/
    As seen at the Maker Faire. Had a long chat about them with their creator there. Beautiful looking boards.

    With the addition of a few 2K static RAMs that can be made to run CP/M. If you want Altair style blinken lights and switches that's a nice little project to add them.
  • TorTor Posts: 2,010
    Tubes was what got me interested in electronics in the first place. Not that I actually worked with them (excepting TV cathode ray tubes) - transistors had taken over when I started - but when I was around 7 we finally got a TV, back in the sixties. But, and my father didn't find out until later, the voltage at our house was around 240 volts (there could be big local variations back then), not 220V as it was supposed to. So the TV failed very often. Every time a repair guy would come to our home, open the back of the TV, figure out what failed, and fix it. With a small boy looking on. So I got to see all those "heaters", and I was fascinated about the idea of being able to fix something like that. Some years later I started to fiddle with transistors etc, and making PCBs at home. Then came schooling, ending up with an EE. But I got hooked on computers around 1976 and adjusted my education to more digital, and parallelled the digital education with programming.

    But it all started with watching a TV repair guy fixing our TV at home, so many times.. so I thank the incorrect voltage (when my father finally figured it out it was just a question of using a different setting on the TV, and that stopped all the home visits by the repairman).
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    Tor,

    That's great.

    I had much the same experience with TVs as a kid. Except the guy I was watching fix the telly was my dad. He was no electronics engineer but he had been building radio recievers as a teenager in the 1930's so of course he was going to crack open the telly and see what he could do.

    Now you remind me of a weird thing...

    For some reason we did not have a decent TV antenna on the roof when I was 10. Just a piece of wire stuffed into the antenna socket. That was great until an aircraft flew over head. Then the signal would fade in an out producing periodic fizz on the sound and snow on the screen. Very annoying.

    A couple of years later I realized what was going on. The aircraft was reflecting the TV signal to us over a non-direct path. As the plane moved that path was changing in length. Sometimes producing an in phase reflection, sometimes an out of phase reflection.

    We basically had a radar system in the house!

    Where do kids get that kind of experience today?



  • MikeDYurMikeDYur Posts: 2,176
    edited 2017-06-19 13:29
    Heater. wrote: »
    Where do kids get that kind of experience today?





    You had great opportunity to learn electronics, with your dad into building radio receivers.

    My father never got out of the tube era, the old Magnavox TV was still in the living room when I sold the house after my parents passing.

    What got me interested in electronics was solid state, and then came digital.
    You ham guys start the fundamentals of electronic theory using tubes as examples.

    The TV shop owner I worked for whas a friend and neighbor to. He would teach me Ohm's law using tubes in a circuit diagram, just wasn't any excitement there. That was probably the best way to learn, but it didn't keep my intention for very long.

    I was into radio to as a teen, bought a Realistic Navajo Pro Niner from RS. The fanciest CB base station they had at the time. You still had to have a license, but you didn't have to know anything to get it.

    Fun times though putting up a big ground plane antenna on my parents roof. After that was accomplished, I was in charge of the TV antenna also.
  • Tubes are great gotta get that heater voltage just right (the knee) for max. electron flow and heater life.
  • Tubes are indeed a pain in the butt to work with, needing heaters and high voltages and mounting considerations and just plain being big and hot. But oh wow are they just beautiful machines. You can look at them and see how they work, and they GLOW. There is something magical about listening to shortwave in a dark room with no light but but the frequency dial lamp and the orange glow of the tubes coming through the cooling vent holes.

    But yeah working on them was dangerous and building them was a major project, more metal forming than electronics. Although I did eventually use one of my antique tubes to build an AM radio, from a Boy's Life project published in 1932. Appropriately for something from the Great Depression it required few parts or tools other than its Type 32 receiving tube, built on a breadboard with even the tube socket crafted from bent wires and a homemade variable capacitor and regenerative tuning coil.
  • msrobotsmsrobots Posts: 3,709
    edited 2017-06-22 04:05
    DigitalBob wrote: »
    Tubes are great gotta get that heater voltage just right (the knee) for max. electron flow and heater life.

    Oh. I hope @Heater. does not get in trouble then, being in California and not around Helsinki or such.

    So what is a good temperature for Heater.'s life?
    Enjoy!

    Mike
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    msrobots,
    So what is a good temperature for Heater.'s life?
    I'm not sure.

    But around here in San Jose life has been upside down in the past few days. I put my jacket on
    because it's so cold in the air conditioned work place. I take my jacket off to go outside for a cigarette.

    Still having a lot of fun around here. Even if there is a lot of work to do.


  • Heater. wrote: »
    But around here in San Jose life has been upside down in the past few days. I put my jacket on
    because it's so cold in the air conditioned work place. I take my jacket off to go outside for a cigarette.


    That is an excellent way to develop bronchial problems. Geting sweated up and going into the air conditioning, is a good way to get a summer cold.

    Your lungs are huffing on a cigarette in the heat and humidity plus air pollution. And then you make a complete opposite change, and go back into cool dry air.

    Drink the sunny California OJ, and get some vitamin C. Don't get one of those summer colds, much more of a miserable experience than the winter version.
  • Most of my tube experience is in high KV rectifier tubes like the ones used in radar etc. You would increase the heater voltage and monitor the current when you hit the max. electron flow that was the knee. Increasing the current past that point did not yield anymore electron flow but would only shorten the heater life.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    @DigitalBob,
    Yes. The last thing we want to do is shorten Heater life. There is precious little left as it is.

    @MikeDYur,

    Funny you should say that. I arrived here with a does of Finnish winter flu. Nearly cancelled the trip. That cleared up pretty quick. A couple of weeks later comes the Californian summer flu. Which does not want to go away after weeks.

    It was so hot on Sunday I drank most of a gallon of sunny California OJ. Did terrible things to my stomach. I should stick to beer :)

  • Heater. wrote: »
    It was so hot on Sunday I drank most of a gallon of sunny California OJ. Did terrible things to my stomach. I should stick to beer :)
    Wow Heater, you realize a gallon of orange juice has over 300 grams of sugar, right? Beer probably would have been healthier.
  • localroger wrote: »
    Heater. wrote: »
    It was so hot on Sunday I drank most of a gallon of sunny California OJ. Did terrible things to my stomach. I should stick to beer :)
    Wow Heater, you realize a gallon of orange juice has over 300 grams of sugar, right? Beer probably would have been healthier.


    Yes, 8 -12oz / day is plenty, acitic acid could be a problem, I think the Calcium content would lead to indigestion.

    Nothing brings a headache the next day like OJ combined with grenidene and whatever.

    The alcohol and the sugar's just don't mix with the heat either.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2017-06-23 00:00
    Beer it is then.

    Luckily they have Boddington's in Mollymagees in Mountain View.
  • Heater. wrote: »
    Beer it is then.

    Luckily they have Boddington's in Mollymagees in Mountain View.

    That sounds more like a meal.

    Look for the words Stout and Full Bodied, they are healthy words, and you should feel better for that.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2017-06-23 16:50
    Hmm..."Stout and Full Bodied".

    You mean like this:



    Edit: Ah, sorry. That won't play here. You have to follow the link.

  • Heater. wrote: »

    Edit: Ah, sorry. That won't play here. You have to follow the link.



    It played in the states, though you would never see a commercial like that here. Not advertising an alcoholic beverage anyway, margerin maybe.

    Don't see beer commercials much at all, just around big sporting events. They are getting a bad rap like cigarettes.
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