HW/SW interface website

Beja

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Hi all, tonight and while searching for my old good days of the nineties and Midnight Engineering and Steve Garcia. I found this website that I tought I can share with you.

All About Circuits - Electrical Engineering & Electronics Community

Premier publication and forum for electrical engineers providing educational material, tools, industry insight, videos, podcasts and conferences
www.allaboutcircuits.com
 

JohnC

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Yeah, I remember their articles - many took a very deep dive in the technical details.

And yes, Steve Garcia of Circuit Cellar Ink was another favorite mag I read.

Ah, 1990's I had a lot of fun designing products using Tango Schematic, Tango PCB with Tango Route and then waiting for the 4-layer boards to come in and then realizing I messed up with something in the inner layers so I couldn't simply fix it by cutting a trace
 

Beja

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I loved the 6802 and lately the 6809 because they had non-multiplexed address bus. Some students were offended by the SEX instruction (Sign EXtend) of the 6809. I think Motorola changed that mnemonic.
I bought Steve Garcia's book on the Z80, which detailed how to build an SBC from scratch. I purchased the Z80 microprocessor, RAM, ROM, an EPROM programmer, a UV eraser, and a handful of glue chips. I made a 4x4 keypad by hand (we didn’t have Amazon at that time, but I mail-ordered the chips from RS Components; we had their catalog in the lab).
I also bought a book titled Z80 Instruction Set.
 

JohnC

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I forgot to mention, I also worked with the Z80 and had to write all the code (Bios + Application) from scratch using machine language.

I had to even create a new font for the CRT display of the project. I wrote a font editor app in Quick Basic 4.5 that allowed me to click on pixels of a GUI to create the bitmap for each character.

I used an in-circuit CPU emulator for the Z80 by Orion Instruments, so I was able to single-step the code and look at register values - it was pretty cool!
 
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Beja

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It was as if we were working at the same bench. Yes, I too wrote programs in machine code, using hexadecimal. Later, I got a computer, the IBM PC XT (the 'XT' stood for Extra Technology, haha). It had a 40-megabyte hard disk, 256K RAM, and a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drive. The Z80 jump instruction was a pain in the neck; you had to calculate the offset address using one's and two's complements—all in binary. But I enjoyed it because it was challenging, and we were young and restless.
!
 

rabbitBUSH

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AH Us OLD guys are trying to keep up with the punchy blow-by-blow reminiscences and punchy lines of tech-speak about stuff our generation invented so the Young 'Uns could fiddle about and get weird ...... then I had to look up Steve Garcia (thinking it was a mistype for Jerry) .....
->
"Steve Garcia Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Steve_Garcia Steve Garcia [in the black shorts] is an American professional mixed martial artist who competes in the Featherweight division of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). "]

Beja said:
It was as if we were working at the same bench.
Click to expand...
Group W bench -> Group W, people being considered for moral waiver by American military. The Group W bench from "Alice's Restaurant" by Arlo Guthrie is a reference to moral waiver.

JohnC said:
Ah, 1990's
Click to expand...
A Spring Chicken I see upon the horizon.......
Beja said:
Midnight Engineering
Click to expand...
won't go into what happened when I looked this up -> safe to say that Bill's little publication didn't make it past the sanctions-line......
 

JohnC

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emexes said:
I'm very confused. Do you mean Steve Ciarcia of Circuit Cellar Inc?
Click to expand...

Wondering How It All Began? - Circuit Cellar |

Whenever I run into Circuit Cellar fans at conventions or gatherings, many invariably mention how they’ve enjoyed following my project...
circuitcellar.com

The Magazine was called "Circuit Celler INK".

"The first issue of Circuit Cellar magazine (initially called Circuit Cellar INK for trademark reasons) was published in January 1988."
 

Beja

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Remembering BYTE, in 1989 there was an article about computers speed. The writer of that (scientific) article said that a microprocessor speed will never exceed the 100MHz because then the transistors will heat up and the chip will burn. I still remember the confidence he was writing with.
 
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