Vintage Computing

The Australian Computer Museum Societies’ warehouse has to shut down next week, so Dave goes warehouse diving. If you know of someone willing to donate warehouse space in Sydney, please let me know. UPDATE: Please don’t contact them with offers of small donations space, they need a HUGE space, as …

A look at one of the world’s first handheld electronics games, the classic 1978 Parker Brother game Merlin The Electronic Wizard. It just so happens to use the world’s first microcontroller, the 4 bit Texas Instruments TMS1000 Some history and a teardown. Nice history of the Merlin development Forum HERE …

Inside a classic 1987 Casio FX-730P Scientific Calculator / BASIC computer Forum HERE Thanks to the Defpom who dropped by the EEVblog lab Podcast: Download

Can a product work without ANY bypass capacitors? Dave finds out by “Muntzing” the Gigatron TTL computer. Lots of interesting talk on bypassing, grounding, probing, signal integrity, ground loops and noise and crosstalk. Forum HERE Links: http://www.electronicdesign.com/boards/whats-all-muntzing-stuff-anyhow http://web.mst.edu/~jfan/slides/Archambeault1.pdf https://ewh.ieee.org/r3/enc/emcs/archive/2012-10-10b_DecouplingMyths.pdf http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/slyp173/slyp173.pdf https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/user_guides/ug483_7Series_PCB.pdf https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/application_notes/xapp623.pdf Podcast: Download

Review of the Gigatron.io TTL 8 bit retro computer kit. The processor is built entirely using TTL logic. http://www.gigatron.io Live 4 hours build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wECZoUNd2GY Forum HERE Podcast: Download