JohnSwenson wrote: 
> My first computer was an 8080 based homebrew monster. I spent a month
> wire wrapping that thing after school. I had an OLD Tecktronix tube
> based scope I used to debug it. The first incarnation just had the
> infamous switches and lights, but it WAS a computer! 8080s were still
> $75 back then, so I had to be darn sure I wasn't going to fry it!

Ahh, yes. Substitute the 8080 for a 6800 and the Tectronix for an even
older Heathkit scope, and you have my story...

> The big improvement came when I got a cassette tape recorder running as
> non-volatile storage. The very first display was a vector display using
> the scope and a couple 8 bit DACs, very crude but it worked. A year
> later I built a color TV interface and wrote a couple video games for
> it. It was done all with SSI and MSI TTL, a big board crammed full of
> parts all wire wrapped. I still can't believe I did some of that stuff
> back then. 

I went almost the same path - first a 7-segment 4 + 2 digit hex display,
then the  2 R-2R ladders on a parallel port as DACS doing X-Y, and then
a video display - in my case black and white, 16 lines of 64 chars. Oh,
and an expansion of RAM from 512 bytes to 2K... :)


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