Articles by SKR Archives - Page 13 of 13

This article resulted from some tinkering in my Z80 environment in the late 1970s, using a homebrew synthesizer for output (see photo below). I did not have any grounding in music theory, so the method described here was merely a starting point based on the recent publication of Fractal mathematics by Voss & Mandelbrot. Music…

One of my early interests in “the computer hobby,” as it was called in the 1970s, was music composition and synthesis. My homebrew 8008 system (October 1974) was immediately paired with a Walsh-function waveform generator and top-octave synthesizer, and as those early heady years passed I turned my attention often to music tools. This article…

This article fell out of my first real consulting gig. I was 25, had gotten a bit of local notoriety for my 1974 homebrew computer system and other projects, and landed a contract with Honeywell to do the HVAC management system for the University of Louisville Campus. They did all the air handling stuff, of…

Back in the late 1970s, I was blending my consulting business with a budding career as a freelance writer. One of my rules for myself was that every project had to yield at least one published article, and this one fell out of a machine that I built for Robinson-Nugent, a manufacturer of IC sockets…

This collection of optical sensing techniques fell out of some consulting I was doing in the mid-1970s, using embedded microprocessor boards to do machine control in industrial environments. I was particularly fond of this article, since their art department took my sheaf of hand-drawn sketches and turned them into a thing of beauty. I ended…

Long ago, I wrote this little humor piece… with fantasies about my homebrew computer developing intelligence and getting bored with sitting around in a keyboard wait loop. This was its first publication, and it later appeared in Mensa Bulletin (June, 1979) and InfoWorld (November 10, 1980). Almost a half-century later, I am very conscious of…

by Steven K. Roberts Cybertronics Early 1975 This little relic is an echo of my 8008 system, and was published in Volume 1, Number 8 of Hal Chamberlin’s The Computer Hobbyist newsletter back in 1975… one of the first publications devoted to the personal computer community in the very early days. My little contribution was…

This was my first published article, and fell out of my work on the homebrew 8008 system that is now in the Computer History Museum (that link includes four detailed photos). It’s basically a one-way simple UAR/T, though those devices were pricey back then… and this design induces the host micro to wait while a…

Articles by SKR

Fractal Music Composition – Creative Computing

Polyphony Made Easy – Byte

Copy/Sort/Search: 8080 Data Manipulation

Increasing Solenoid Speed – Machine Design

Reliable Sensing with Optoelectronics – Machine Design

Lament for the Semi-Sentient

DEAL – Card Dealing Subroutine – Computer Hobbyist

Baudot Teletype Interface – Electronics