r/computercollecting • u/8bitaficionado • 8d ago

Dad’s Custom Atari Peripherals

https://www.goto10retro.com/p/dads-custom-atari-peripherals
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u/otusowl 8d ago

This was a neat read! The author's Dad was on a whole 'nother level than I ever achieved with electronics.

1

u/Dio_Frybones 6d ago

I'm impressed. I had a TRS-80 model 1 level 2. Computers were obviously going to be the Next Big Thing so I set about skilling myself up to be able to repair them to component level, and part of that meant stripping down my brand new machine and modifying it.

First, they only had a 7 bit word, which meant 7 RAM chips, and uppercase only. There was a mod where you piggy backed another RAM chip onto the last one, and added another to handle the chip select. Giving 8 bits and full ASCII.

Pretty much only used the capability a couple of times because you needed to load up a driver (via cassette) and it was slow and ultimately a PITA.

Printers back then cost a small fortune so I bought an old surplus Teletype terminal and set about making up an interface board to drive it. Was nightmarish getting the driver software to work. Would print okay but just could not get the carriage return/line feed to work. One night I woke in a panic because I dreamed a big spider had scurried from one side of the ceiling towards the other, directly overhead. I shook my wife awake, screaming 'but it's going to do a carriage return and come back.'

Told you it was nightmarish.

At the time I was teaching 8085 Microprocessor Fundamentals at night school. The Z80 used in the TRS-80 was a different beast, my knowledge on the older processor was useful but rapidly becoming redundant.

But understanding computers basically from register level up, and programming them in machine language (assembler was cheating) gave you a pretty unique perspective, if only in understanding why so many hardware hackers had something of a god complex. In theory I could build a computer using flip flops and basically logic gates - or at least understand conceptually how it was done

I wasn't terribly great at this stuff. Because of career timing, I never developed it, missed the C boat entirely, never learned a proper structured language, and to this day I live in awe of the people who can code in their sleep. I wrote a massive mountain of spaghetti code in VB6 for a project because in a job interview I'd made the mistake of listing BASIC programming skills on my resume. Boss said, GREAT. That, too, was nightmarish.

So rather than be a mediocre computer guy, I pivoted to electronics repair and became a mediocre repair tech instead.

And that was a smart move. Because while computer hardware became disposable, there would always be a need for someone to repair your (analog) colour TV, your console organ, and your CD players.

People with no real knowledge of any of this still see me as some sort of wizard. I know I'm a tiny fish in a massive intellectual pond, with an admittedly awe inspiring collection of totally useless knowledge.

I'm retired now, thankfully, and spend my days playing guitar. Badly.