bread boarding taken a little too far

oted text -

It's close. The worst cable job I ever saw was on a sightly grander scale. This was circa Hurricane Andrew.

A two-way radio installation (trunked radio /SMR) down at the old WCIX tower in Miami. We had nicknamed it the "Scud Missile" room.

Wires and coax everywhere.!!!! You have to picture a Ted's Shed (like a big garden shed) - open the door and BAM!! so many cables in your face you couldn't even enter! I mean -- you have to work HARD to end up with something like that. Entropy will never quite get that bad.

I must say... It was much improved (if a bit wet and scattered about the property!) after Andrew. :) I suspect a scud would have yielded similar benefits.

Interesting pattern: seemed to be like one of those Handi Wipe reusable cloths.

On a sunny day (Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:56:56 +1000) it happened Grant wrote in :

I dunno, I never had access to CP/M, but wanted to read some floppies from the CP/M user group at that time (early eighties). I only had the Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81(US called it 'Timex' IIRC),

so I started converting that hardware little by little to a more universal thing that could run CP/M. I had the API specs for CP/M, so I then wrote a CP/M clone using a Z80 assembler on the ZX81. That was a tape assembler, so every time you made an error and it crashed, you needed to reload it, took about 15 minutes to reload and try again. Made me a *really* precise programmer :-) First thing I build was a PIO extension board that could be used as EPROM programmer. Later I got hold of an IBM PC keyboard, the ZX81 had a foil keyboard that was difficult to use, so I added some flip flops to make a shift register to use that IBM keyboard: ftp://panteltje.com/pub/z80/z80-cpu2.jpg Did you mention aged labels? :-) Note the connector con2 marked 'IKBD' on the right, IC21 is the shift register for the keyboard, IC18 the PIO that reads it, true IBM style, like the original PC>

Added a floppy driver, and later added the graphics card, By then my CP/M clone worked so well I could run the C80 Software Toolworks C compiler on it. With that C compiler and a real keyboard things speeded up considerably.

I wrote all the soft for it, many comm programs, even an audio editor. Yes there was a sound card too (8 bits). Later when I finally bought a PC with DRDOS, wrote a MSDOS converter so I could read and write MSDOS floppies on the CP/M system. I thought DOS was less advanced compared to CP/M, so did not bother to write a clone ..... Somebody called that DOS a 'dirty hack' IIRC, before Billy bought it.

Yes, at my job I worked with the IBM PC, among other things designing ISA cards... I started using the 8051 and the like for embedded, I did the CP/M thing in a summer holiday :-)