DigicoolThings Forum

Hi,

I'm Paul and I built my first microcomputer in my Dad's garage sometime around 1977 - as many did at the time.

I had just started an Electrical Engineering degree and we were going to be using 6800 microcomputers in second year. By salvaging some offcuts for a box, striping parts out of old radios and TVs for the power supply, and rewiring an old calculator for I/O, I was able to build a 6800 micro (with 6875 clock and 256 bytes of RAM). After months of tinkering I managed to get it to blink an LED - my parents were both very underwhelmed.

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I had big plans for this post degree (eg 6809, 68000), but life happened, I had a career in corporate software, and the world moved on.

Now that I have retired I have been enjoying watching people with their retro computers on YouTube - when I noticed people reviving retro projects with modern parts (which cost near to nothing compared to the equivalent in the 1980s) and decided to "rescue" my old projects from my mate's shed where they have been collecting dust for the past forty years.

Which is when I found this MECB project, that is what I always imagined how my projects would have looked - if the means were available back in 1977!

I’m planning on building a MECB 6809 project, then adding a 6502 board.

Looking forward to sharing and discussing our progress.

Thanks.

Welcome Paul. It's great to see you here on the forum. I look forward to hearing more about your retro rediscovery journey.

I think you'll find a group of fellow enthusiasts here, who all share similar stories of how they got started with microprocessors back in the day.

Your comment about MECB describes exactly what drove me to define it. Rediscovering my stored early projects, and taking the original process I'd used with wire-wrap and Eurocards (back in the early days), and modernising to take advantage of today's PCB design tools and ease of PCB manufacturing! Also, knowing that the chips of the 8-bit era, that took weeks of teenage pay-packets to save-up for back then, are now available to us cheaply.
Overall, capability that would have seemed like a science fiction dream come true, back then.

Have fun, and enjoy your re-discovery journey!

Greetings Paul,
6809, 6502, what more could you want. I'm finding the MECB much more satisfying that the other Z80 based retro system I also have. But I'm about to make a bridging adaptor so I can use cards from it on the MECB.

I too started my MECB journey after trying to get my old homebrew system working again but got pleasantly sidetracked with the new system.
Best regards, David.

Thanks!

Having been out of electronics for about forty years I'm finding it a bit like being a time traveler. All the things that made sense in the 1980's have been turned on their heads. At uni there was a 'Logic Analyser', only the Senior Lecturer was allowed anywhere near it as it was rumoured to cost as much as a new car - I just bought the modern equivalent for $10. Back then a microprocessor was an exotic and rare thing that was reserved for only the most important and critical tasks - now new designs are regularly using microcontrollers (with more power than we could have imaged) to blink an LED since microcontrollers can cost as little as 20 cents in bulk. Making a PCB was the last step in a long process of testing your design - now you just send your prototype design off to be made, and if it doesn't work or you think of something better, you just send a revised version off.

It's a lot to get my head around - but it's going to be fun learning.