1970's Homebrew Computer Experience

Join David as he recounts his homebrewed 6502-based computer experiences from the late 1970's.

Music (Pinnacle 19.5 royalty-free music):
Pulsing Dance
House Fever
Reaction Time
City Night Groove

[xheralt]

My dad, while working at ITT on their timesharing mainframes in the 70's, homebuilt the beginnings of a computer based on a Fairchild F8 processor board. The TTY interface and RAM was breadboarded, as was his eight LED bus status indicator, his terminal was a TI Silent 700 ASR (dual cassette decks). He had a 5¼" floppy, but never progressed to read/write from it; he could issue TURN DISK ON and TURN DISK OFF commands from the terminal to start or stop the drive motor but that was about it.

[edgeeffect]

reel-to-reel is just SO much cooler than cassette... seeing the reels turn has such a "mainframe feel" to it.

[dylanhall]

Awesome! Thanks, you're video has made my evening

[crouchinghamster]

Man! What an awesome story. I always feel grateful to have lived through both the personal computer and internet revolutions. You had a front row seat!

[KCKEP]

Nice video .. Thanks for creating and posting it! I absolutely loved this era of home-brewing and micro computing. I'm thinking of making a video about my creations as well. It's interesting how my development activities followed similar steps as yours .. I suppose these steps were the logical evolution of a home brew system :-)

[jimm]

As dust flew off my personal memory chips, I actually remembered Dr. Dobbs, Byte, and electronic breadboards. Now, where did that wire-wrap tool go? Consequently, I hope to remain anonymous.

[derekchristenson]

What a cool homebrew machine! Also very impressive that you modified it to make it Apple II-compatible. 🙂

[bitsinthebasement]

Hats off, I'm in awe of what you managed to do. Like wanting to build a car but first you need to build the garage and all the tools to go in it.

[darkenergy]

Who would have thought that a HVAC relay replacement would have led me to one of the old school computer hackers. After having some really difficult computer experiences in school, I went into power systems and avoided computers until I bought an Atari 800 (mostly to play games 😅). But your computer skills are 1000 times what I could ever muster. Now days I just use my computer to run Linux, surf the web, run Quicken, and file my taxes.

And I love your old computer build. Very impressive (and I mean that in a good way).

[jchidley]

My first computer was a C64. Your story of home brewing a computer is amazing to me. You were one of the early pioneers of the home computer revolution. And now you’re still home brewing but with newer hardware!

[Jasona]

David, maintaining a home brew apple compatible 6502 still during the 90’s(!) says it all. An amazing achievement, and a story that way more people should hear. All the best. A9 2A

[mitsuruyamada]

You are amazing. I also built my own 8bit computer in 1980, but didn't develop it much after that. I have been working on it again for about 10 years now.

[TMJ__]

Thank You for a great video with your memories and for sharing your early retro FPGA experiences. Your life experiences is interesting to watch. Greetings from Poland.

[cbmeeks]

Loved this video. Do you visit the 6502 forums?

[krallja]

Great video. I love how you were able to just barely keep up with the innovations of the entire home computer industry for a while there.