Digitalker

8 responses to “Digitalker”

1. 

   Sam Scholes

   Jan 31, 2005 at 5:55 am

   Great addition to the vintage electronics group, thank you.

   Reply
2. 

   schoschie

   Jan 30, 2008 at 2:08 pm

   It’s a beauty. You made it?

   Reply
3. 

   jurvetson

   Jan 30, 2008 at 4:57 pm

   Yes – designed, programmed (boot ePROM), wirewrapped, and most difficult of all, debugged. 😉

   The PCB was pre-printed and is a generic test bed.

   Reply
4. 

   schoschie

   Jan 30, 2008 at 9:47 pm

   Ah, thx. Wonderfully geeky and admirable, if I may say so. Maybe I should’ve taken electronics engineering in place of graphic design. I didn’t do it because I killed all the transistors in my electronics kit when I was 11, I think.

   Reply
5. 

   schoschie

   Jan 30, 2008 at 9:52 pm

   An acquaintance of mine once wrote a minimalistic gui system for an Atari 800 XL. This was around 1988, I think. It offered a mouse pointer and a simple menu bar and menus, and it was written in 6502 assembly. I’ll always remember when he told me it took him about half an hour to write it, and two weeks to debug.

   Reply
6. 

   schoschie

   Jan 24, 2009 at 3:36 pm

   I just found this madness which I thought you might be interested in, too. This guy from Sweden has made an old-school C64-like demo with multicolor video and multichannel sound using only a microcontroller (Atmel AVR with just 1 kB of RAM but 20 MHz clock nonetheless), but no other hardware, no dedicated video chip or sound chip. Both the video and audio signals are created completely in software. Crazy!

   http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNCqrylNY-0

   Reply
7. 

   jurvetson

   Jan 24, 2009 at 7:02 pm

   Brilliant. The parsimony of his design reminds me of a company that I invested in, called iTv Corp. They built a web access appliance that would connect to a TV for a total cost of $19 (including power supply, keyboard, everything). It used so little power that it woulld keep running for a couple minutes with the AC plug pulled. They also did all NTSC and PAL signal generation and modem functionality on chip. This was before WebTV launched, but WebTV beat them by being more industry-standards compliant. To achieve their coast goals, iTv went way funky, with a 5 bit asynchronous processor (no clock) running Forth and a custom OS. Yikes!

   Reply
8. 

   schoschie

   Jan 25, 2009 at 1:20 pm

   5 bit? No clock? Forth? Sounds insane! My mind does not wrap around the concept of an odd number of bits, but I guess it’s just due to convention. Have to think about it more. IIRC, one of Konrad Zuse’s electro-mechnical machines was three-bit.

   I keep being impressed and inspired by peoples’ ingenuity and incitement (sometimes bordering on obsession). Talking about child-like minds!

   I like your choice of the term parsimony here, btw. I read it as "efficiency that went slightly overboard" 🙂

   Reply