Happy New Years everyone! It's officially 2020, which means I'll be
graduating in four more months! It's hard to believe that I've already
been in college for three and a half years - one of which I just spent in
Japan (where I have successfully arrived back from)! I'm going to be
graduating with a bachelor's of science in Creative Writing with a minor
in English Literature. (Yes, a BS -- turns out taking the two Computer
Science classes that Millsaps offers plus some others is just enough to
pass for it). I'm not looking suuuuper forward to having to take basically
all English and writing classes this final semester, but at the very least
I'll have it all done and over with.
On to projects for this year -- of which there are many! I am about bound
and determined this year to get my ADM-5 terminal up and going (although
it will probably be after I graduate since I'm not hauling it to the
college this time around). I ordered Geoff's VT100 kit (which is basically
a hardware terminal on a chip) off of Tindie and will eventually get a
GBS-8100 to convert the VGA signal from the board to a 15khz signal that
will work with the terminal's video board (for which I also have the parts
to repair). I actually ordered the GBS-8100 already, but the seller on
eBay sent the wrong thing, so I'll just wait until I'm actually ready to
repair it to order it again, since I don't have much longer at home before
returning to school. I also got a heckton of diodes for it for whenever I
do eventually get around to the keyboard build (which is further off --
and less important -- than the video signal).
I've also got an Altair 8800! Mike Douglas, who sells the Altair 8800
Clone computer, put up a video on YouTube a while back about his Altair
8800c (following MITS' Altair 8800b) which is essentially a brand new
Altair computer built from reproduced/updated S-100 boards, a better
backplane and power supply, and Douglas' clone case (with screws for the
S-100 motherboard). I've poured a heckton of money (most of which came out
of my leftover loans from the past two semesters) into building this
thing, so I'm hoping it all works out once I'm done with the build. I
*did*, unfortunately, solder in two ICs backwards on the front panel
board - so after some hard debate with myself and a fight with my cheap
and awful desoldering pump, I went ahead and ordered a desoldering iron
with a vacuum tip. I'm hoping that putting the ICs in properly gets the
thing working (and that I didn't fry anything with my mess-up). We'll see
on Monday!
I also ordered a PiDP-11 kit and will be building it soon. I don't
remember if it came with a Pi or not, but if not I'll just use my old Pi
2b. I would hope that if it can run Chromium, it can run Unix System 7
lol.
Anyway, that's about it for now! I'm going to try and be a bit more active
on SDF now that I'm back and working on all of these projects (I'd also
like to build and commercialize a game for some old system by the end of
the year - which will hopefully be an attainable feat).
