Ancient Behemoths

The two recent pointers to ancient Winnebiko and BEHEMOTH media coverage finally motivated me to find a decent photo-album tool, so a quick visit to the Mac OS X side of Versiontracker yielded the Java-based JAlbum, and the result is that about 50 scans from my media coverage over the years are now online here. It was pretty painless, since I didn't have to manually crunch all the thumbnails and IMG tags. The worst part, of course, was this pathetic half-speed dialup connection... I just launched an SCP of the whole mess with Fugu and had dinner while 6 megabytes oozed recursively off the island. Ain't technology wonderful?

And speaking of golden oldies... here is a very early personal computer:


This is the front panel of the system I designed and built in 1974, based on an Intel 8008 CPU with a 600 kHz clock and 4Kx8 Static RAM made of 2102s. I was reminiscing about this earlier today while, cleaning my office, I stumbled across the original file of 30-year-old schematics. It was all wire-wrapped (on 60-socket Augat panels plugged into a Scanbe "Rapid Rack" card cage), and the design included a number of enhancements that overcame the 8008's intrinsic shortcomings... in particular, a hardware hack that added a data stack in RAM in addition to the 7-level return stack. There were also 8 interrupt channels, 64 bits each of input and output, a graphics subsystem using a pair of 8-bit multiplying DACs outputting X-Y to an oscilloscope from a DMA display list, and a painfully slow math co-processor made from a Taylor-Series calculator chip with kluged BCD and 7-segment interface. I remember the night it drew a lovely (sin X)/X curve... took HOURS and I had consumed half a bottle of Jack Daniels by the time it was done, but it was a thing of beauty, I tellya what.

This machine also implemented Walsh-function waveform synthesis and a top-octave synthesizer for music projects, a hardware polyphonic music keyboard interface that I published in Byte, a one-shot Hollerith card reader that allowed me to boot-load with a multi-punched image instead of wearing my fingers out with deposit-next, Friden paper tape reader and punch, 1200 baud cassette interface, and a hardware driver for the marvelous Model 28 Baudot teletype that I still recall with fondness. (This latter circuit was my first published magazine article... in the July 25, 1974 issue of Electronics magazine.)

I sure do miss front panels. This one got a lot of use, and my early "screen saver" was a 555 (associated with the black knob) that allowed variable-speed single-stepping and a corresponding hypnotic blinking of the address and data bus LEDs.

Damn. 30 years. I started my beard the day this machine first worked, which was October 31, 1974. It was, like my bike, named BEHEMOTH (for "Badly Engineered Heap of Electrical, Mechanical, Optical, & Thermal Hardware"), and it's on display at the Computer History Museum, which is also where BEHEMOTH-the-bicycle lives. The photo above is courtesy of Jason Scott, who recently visited the museum and posted a page of photos.

In other news...

Items sold since last entry:

Palm Cradle - $3.50 to Redmond, Washington
Linux Journal back issues - $12.23 to Purcellville, Virginia
Arctic Odyssey by Len Sherman - $10.50 to Wewoka, Oklahoma

New goodies on eBay:

Modern Sex Techniques, published in 1959
49 Quartz-window DIP EPROMS (27C64, -128, -1024, & -2048)

Site updates:

Media album discussed above