Whow, there are more oldies like me around...

The first thing I did was loading a short routine to make available a hex
keypad, to get rid of the entering of address and data bytes by the
dip-switches... then there came a second step in the bootstrap process,
entered using the hex keypad, to get to a cassette tape loader, and
by the time I got that operational the ELF and Super-ELF came to the market,
RCA 1802 based boards that had tape utilities and a keypad on board, an even
4k of RAM, while the SC/MP had 512 bytes...
The whole thing started because my friends and me wanted our Railroad System,
the Central Pacific Railroad, built in Rotterdam, Holland, CTC controlled..
this system contained long underground trajects, so a kind of train tracking
was needed. This took so much TTL or CMOS that it looked
attractive to use micros instead.
Funny that now, some 15 years later I am turning to PIC's to ease some
model railroad jobs..

Ron Kreymborg wrote:

> Hey! My first too! Must have been around '77. Had to build a laboratory
> controller that monitored an analogue input and switched various outputs
> as a result. Would have been a lot of '74 parts and the SC/MP looked like
> it could do the job in one chip. Wrote an assembler in Basic and when I
> was happy with the code, burnt it into a fusible link prom. I think it had
> 32 8-bit locations. Had to build the prom programmer first. Big kick when
> it worked! I found later it was the first time a micro had been used for
> laboratory control at Monash Uni.
>
> Ron
>
> On Thu, 30 Apr 1998, Russell McMahon wrote:
>
> > My first "micro-computer" was one I built myself (a friend's
> > design) based on the SC/MP ("SCAMP") (remember them?) from
> > NatSemi. We had 8 switches on the data bus and used the fact
> > that the chip would count up through memory on startup, and
> > had a static clock. You would start it up, set the data
> > switches to the required code and press "enter". This would
> > input one byte (here byte = 8 bits :-)) and so on. There was
> > NO other program loading device so you did this every time
> > you wanted a program loaded. I guess programs were fairly
> > small and power tended to be left on.
> >
> > You can probably work out approximately how old I am from
> > this :-).
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Andy Kunz <mtdesign@FAST.NET>
> > To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU <PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
> > Date: Thursday, 30 April 1998 02:16
> > Subject: Re: [0t]bit,byte,nibble & futher off topic
> >
> >
> > >>Takes me back a long time. The UYK 'family' were based on
> > the MPC-16 micro
> > >>emulator. You could not believe the amount of products
> > that UNIVAC marketed
> > >>from that basic design.
> > >
> > >They were pretty good machines, too.  Flipping the toggles
> > and LOAD to
> > >bootstrap them was a pain, though.
> > >
> > >Andy
> > >
> >



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