Home » Computing

NC4016 – A Forth chip ahead of its time

As a trainee i had the privilege of working with a Novix NC4000 beta Board – It used a NC4016 Forth CPU that maintained separate code and stack space, making it incredibly fast. Allowing separate busses allowed the…

Read More »

Reading Paper Tapes in 2022

I have a couple of old paper tapes – I also have an ASR33 teletype, which is more than capable of reading a tape, but making the ASR33 operate correctly is a labor of love which I will…

Read More »

My IMSAI is alive!!

It’s been an epic week. I got my IMSAI S100 system running. I replaced the 120v linear power supply with a couple of modern switchers – now the system is sooo much lighter, and I can plug it…

Read More »

An 80188 based SBC

Last night I completed my 80188 based SBC-188 build. It is a ECB board designed by John Coffman in the Retrocomputers forum that provides an Intel 80188 coupled with 1Mb of RAM and 128k of ROM. It also…

Read More »

Dracblade – A Propeller based Z80 CP/M board

A couple of years ago, a fellow named Dr. Acula designed a neat little Parallax Propeller based board that implemented a full CP/M system providing a Z80 with dual serial, 512k Ram, VGA, PS/2 Keyboard, and SD storage….

Read More »

A Z180 based SBC

I recently decided to finish my Z180 based Single Board computer. It is a board named the “N8” designed in about 2012 as part of the then expanding N8VEM series of projects. It was neat because it promised…

Read More »

Using the USB ATTiny 85 boards

I have always loved the Arduino universe. I started originally with Microchip PIC devices, but once I discovered Arduino, my world changed :-). For the last year or so, I have been playing with a tiny board that…

Read More »

The world of Raspberry Pi Clusters

(or – how to chuck a heap of computers into a small space… to do SDR functions.) So – One of my fellow Ham operators here in Canberra, Wade (VK1MIC) showed me a photo of his cluster of…

Read More »

A Rockwell RSC Forth System

When I was a trainee in the Electronics Lab at the Research School of Physical Sciences at the Australian national university, we used Forth to control systems. Tom Rhymes had designed a locally developed Z80 STD bus board,…

Read More »