What impresses me most about Tom's letter was that he doesn't get into
reams and reams of people who were part of the team.  Back then (and still
now) the best programs (and systems) are those which are usually put
together by a very small set of folks.

One nice part of PICs is there isn't room to put a bunch of programmers on
one PIC program!

Andy



At 08:59 AM 9/1/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Wow are you guys dragging up memories!!!
>
>The 1650 was the first commercially available PIC and the -xxx series
>denoted one with a particular program that was used for some purpose.
>The -532 strikes a chord, but I can't remember what it did.
>
>The AY8910 was the world's first digital sound generator. It had three
>channels and was developed when us folks working on the video game chip set
>decided that viewers were also listeners. My reason (believe it or not) for
>recommending three channels was that I was working on a racing game that had
>two side by side tracks and I needed a channel for each track and another
>for miscellaneous effects. It was followed by a much improved AY8930 but by
>that time the game was over. By the way, the silicon designer I worked with
>on the 8930 is now the editor in chief of an important magazine in our
>industry.
>
>The SP0256 was a very neat second generation speech processor that had
>on-board rom for holding a compressed form of bits that were decoded into
>the excitation parameters and filter coefficient for the "model of the vocal
>tract". We did several pre-programmed versions including the -AL2 which
>contained an allaphone set that could be used to construct rather robotic
>sounding speech and a few sound effects.
>
>The PICAL was indeed a fortran-based assembler which produced some wonderful
>relocatable code in a form that predates but has a lot of the philosphical
>features of the COFF format of compiler output. The reason for the fortran
>base was the available machines at the time were main frames. Later (again
>believe it or not) my team did an assembler written in basic (PICALB) for
>the same reason -- The Apple machines were the only personal computers in
>large circulation and their native code was Basic. Another historical
>note -- when Apple sent us the code for the Basic Interpreter in the Apple
>II, the author's name was in the first few lines of comments -- Steve
>Wozniak.
>
>The PICES was this large metal box that successfully emulated the PIC series
>and was written using the same fortan-based assembler. We wanted to call it
>an "ICE", but the name was already trademarked.
>
>Sorry for the nostalgia trip and other worthless trivia. The tools, the
>parts and the techniques we have now make our job so much easier. But the
>biggest factor, of course, is the raw talent typified by this list that can
>really put all this together into great products!
>
>Tom
>
>>

==================================================================
Andy Kunz               Life is what we do to prepare for Eternity
------------------------------------------------------------------
andy@rc-hydros.com      http://www.rc-hydros.com     - Race Boats
andy@montanadesign.com  http://www.montanadesign.com - Electronics
==================================================================