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Issue #236 March 2010
A Matter of History
by Steve Ciarcia
A couple months ago, a columnist in one of the major American car magazines was recollecting about all the cars he had personally owned over the years. It was an interesting list, ranging from consumer vehicles to European exotics, and it spanned quite a few years. Certainly, plunking down personal money for a Porsche or two added critical experience and credibility when it came to writing test reports on the latest Audi R8, but I really think he just wanted an excuse to reminisce with his longtime readers who'd shared similar ownership experiences.
Considering many of us have been hanging around together here and at BYTE for 30-plus years, I guess it's OK for me to reminisce once in a while too. I’d love to describe my experience owing a few European exotics, but I suspect that this isn't the place to find a lot of similar ownership experiences. Instead, at Circuit Cellar, I guess we just sit down with a glass of cognac and reminisce about how we all got into the current mess—computers, that is. ;-)
For me, it started in 1973. I was an engineer at Control Data Corporation performing the '70s-era version of embedded control (gluing minicomputers onto production processes). As a reader of Radio Electronics, I avidly read about and then built the 16 line × 32 character TV typewriter (by Don Lancaster) presented in the September 1973 edition. I quickly got it to work, but I fondly remember that the entire digital design—which also included some analog circuit tweaking—functioned pretty much like one big “controlled” race condition. But hey, it worked.
Having a serial terminal didn't mean much by itself, but that was soon remedied by the Mark-8 Computer that appeared in the July 1974 issue of Radio Electronics. Presented by Jon Titus, the Mark-8 used the new Intel 8008 and, in my opinion, started both the personal computer revolution and the point of no return for my career. Jon's article was revolutionary, but a bit too DIY for most. The article offered complete plans and sets of PC boards but no complete kits. The Mark-8 newsletter, started as a support for those of us scrounging for parts, contained the first published project written by yours truly (about power supply design).
I never actually built the Mark-8, because immediately after Jon's article was published, I discovered that barely 50 miles south of me Scelbi Computers was selling an 8008-based computer. Fortunately, I was able to convince Nat Wadsworth to sell a PC board set to a poor newbie engineer. Within a couple months, I had an 8008 computer with 16 KB of memory, a cassette interface, a TV typewriter, and a vector graphics display.
From then on, developments came in rapid succession. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800 based on Intel's next-generation 8080 processor and presented the S-100 bus architecture for the first time. While there was a kit available for the Altair, I was skeptical because the price for the basic kit was less than what Intel was quoting as the price of the 8080 processor by itself. Many of us didn't order Altair kits because delivery was slow and we feared it might contain a "drop-out" (and justifiably lower priced) processor. Before I could satisfy my gripes and prejudices to order an Altair, I discovered the Digital Group and BYTE magazine.
BYTE started publishing in September 1975. My first article, the vector graphic display for my 8008 computer, appeared in November 1976. This first project used the 8008 because that's all there was, but it wasn't the article's focus. Especially when I had a regular design column to consider, I had to think about generic compatibility. Like all my early projects, this vector display and subsequent hardware interfaces were parallel port driven. The separate I/O bus, along with interchangeable CPU cards on the Digital Group computer, enabled me to easily interface these monthly projects. I upgraded to a Z80 CPU because it was faster than the 8080/8008 and wrote the interface code using a universal BASIC interpreter because it was understood by a wide segment of the readership. I certainly appreciated the utility of Apple, KIM, TRS-80, VIC-20, and so on, but I wanted to avoid brand-specific projects and CPU-specific code until a brand became ubiquitous enough to justify a specific discussion. During the early days, when many of you were KIM or Osborne Computer owners, I wasn't discriminating. I was attempting to stay generic.
Of course, nothing lasts forever. Subsequent evolutions in computer architecture and software have redefined development computers and implementation electronics again and again. Today, universal adoption of the desktop PC virtually dictates that all software development starts there, while the continued advancement of inexpensive mega-function microcontrollers (aka 100 kilos in a 1-gram bag) prescribes "smart-dust" control for virtually everything except a rock.
So, reminiscing about my past computer selections only serves to remind me that all the computers I've owned had more to do with writing/managing articles than warm fuzzy personal compatibility. With all that said, I don't think I missed any life-changing experiences by failing to be up close and personal with a Sinclair ZX-80, but I certainly would have missed a lot without a Ferrari.
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