This article spun out of the process of organizing the mess that had grown around my home computer system, but it had a delightfully unexpected result: shortly after publication, Prentice-Hall called and asked if I’d like to expand it into a book. Well, sure! I got to work on a more thorough discussion of the…

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My first book, written for technicians encountering service issues with those newfangled microprocessors, was published in October 1980. This fell out of a series I wrote for Electronic Technician/Dealer magazine beginning with the August 1978 issue, and covered what was then a rather esoteric subject… driven by the recognition of this transformative technology as it…

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This was a quick little hack… way back in the day, a good and cheap tool for programming EPROMs in an S-100 bus computer was a board called the Bytesaver (by Cromemco). The only catch was that for every cycle, you had to shut the computer down and pull out the board. In a production…

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During the late ’70s, I was making a living on the fringes of the burgeoning personal computer industry with a crazy mix of freelance writing, custom industrial control systems, surplus parts mail-order house, and computer store. The big lesson in this is that one can’t be all things to all people, but the activity that…

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