Current Projects
Check out my current projects related to the KIM-1 single board computer on my KIM-1 Computing page:
History
It started when I took a Fortran programming class in High School where we logged on to a Xerox Sigma 9 system and loaded and ran our programs via paper tape using two Model 33 ASR teletypes in the back of the room.
Systems I have worked with:
Minicomputers:
Data General Nova Minicomputers – Senior year in high school, via the Industrial Coop program run by Roger Peirce, I got a job at Argonne National Laboratories programing Nova Minicomputers within the Low Level Gamma Ray counting group. The radiation levels were so low that background radiation would interfere with the measurement, so I worked in a room that branched out from the basement, was under a 10-foot pile of dirt. The room was lined with lead recovered from the keel of a Viking ship since all lead refined after we started atmospheric detonations of atomic weapons has ultra-trace levels of isotopes that would create background interference. Since this was the mid-70s, I hope if a Soviet attack came, it would happen while I was at work. It was my introduction to scientific instrument development and I was hooked.
I worked on two identical Nova systems of the 800/1200 series. I am not sure of the exact models, but I remember the front panels loaded with switches which were used to manually load a bootstrap program to load the rest of the program from paper tape using the ubiquitous Model 33 teletype. Each system had 32K of magnetic core memory, a data acquisition card and a display driver card that created a graphical display on an oscilloscope.
I worked with these systems half time during my Senior year and returned for two summer internships while in college. This experience enabled me to get a part time job (10 hrs/week) during my Senior year at Purdue programing a similar Nova computer configuration in the Audiology department to generate stimulus signals and record responses for auditory research being led by Dr. Larry Feth.
After two summer internships at Argonne, I got internships for two successive summers at Standard Oil of Indiana in Naperville, again programing Nova minicomputers in their Mass Spectrometry group. This was my first introduction to mass spec which ended up being a significant part of my career. By now these were Nova 3 systems with a 1970’s futuristic from panel. These were also the first systems I worked on with a hard disk drive, which if memory serves had one 5 MB fixed drive and a 5 MB removable platter the size of a medium pizza. These systems had CRT terminals and there was a Tektronix 4010 Graphics terminal which was the first graphical display I encountered. As a result of all of these experiences I logged about a year and half of experience with Nova computer systems.
DEC PDP 11/23 – On the basis of my work with the Audiology department, while I was in graduate school at Michigan State, a physics professor (whose name escapes me at the moment) who was doing audiology research (who when asked why a physics professor was doing audiology research he responded with one word, “tenure”) reached out to me to help setup a PDP 11/23 system while he was out on sabbatical. My interactions with the PDP 11/23 were limited to unboxing, setting up and configuring the system and writing a few small assembly language drivers for the ADC and DAC system, but in reality, my experience with 11/23 systems can be measured more realistically in weeks rather than months.
Microprocessors and Microcontrollers:
6502/KIM-1 – More information can be found on my KIM-1 page
8085/8088 – In graduate school, our research group developed our own microprocessor architecture for instrument control application. These systems used the Intel 8085 or 8088 processor. I was principally responsible for the group adapting FORTH to program these systems and I wrote thousands of lines of FORTH code. I only wrote a minimal amount in 8085/8088 assembly language. For some reason I never warmed to the instruction set. If you dig deep enough into my Graduate school page, you can find more details about these systems.
6803 – Several projects at HP Labs in the mid-1980’s, Bar Sample labeling system, servos for a laboratory robot (ORCA) and an automatic key based logon system for the Medical group. All this work was done in assembly language on the 6803 which had only 128 BYTES of RAM and 2K bytes of ROM. The 6803 is a derivative of the 6800 and uses the same instruction set, which is also very similar to the 6502.
65F11 – Used this obscure member of the 6502 family, which had a version of FORTH embedded in ROM, to program a controller for remote video camera control and develop a dedicated Melt Index Computing system for Standard Oil of Indiana, based on my first patent US4,333,336. I hope to post more about this system in the future.