My first computer: the 1976 SC/MP 8-Bit Microprocessor Kit
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- Опубліковано 15 жов 2024
- Although the SC/MP is very special to me, it must have been one of the most under-powered 8-bit microprocessors unleashed at the time (1976). But I didn't know any better, and in my 14-year old eyes, it was nothing short of amazing. This was my first computer hands-on experience. I discovered microprocessor fundamentals and assembly programming with it, all in the glory of raw hexadecimal machine coding. I found my beloved kit again during a visit at my parents, along with my notes, and brought it back to its native Silicon Valley birthplace (the National Semi plant, now Texas Instruments, is down the road from me on my way to work). Time to revive it after nearly 40 years, and relive my first steps in computing, and lessons I have never forgotten.
Complete info on the SC/MP Kit and this project on my web site:
www.curiousmar...
More videos on the hardware shown in this video:
DolchPAC 65 computer: • Dolch PAC 65 teardown,...
Data I/O 29B EPROM Programmer: • Data I/O 29B PROM Prog...
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My first microcomputer (I had been programming on mainframes since I was 14) was the "Cosmac Elf" which used an RCA 1802 microprocessor. One of the example programs in the manual was called "Spirit of 76" which made a sound very much like your siren program, except in reverse. The 76 op code (hex) shifted bits in the accumulator which, as part of a loop, generated the tones programmatically. The 1802 had a single bit register called the X register (which in the kit I had was connected to the speaker) and it was set using the "set x" command, for which the mnemonic was SeX. 19 year old me found this very humorous.
Holy christ the knowledge of this man is astonishing, the passion and detail he put in all of his videos is just a pleasure to watch
Amen.
Personally I preferred the biscuit tin box , it is more home brew
And probably the interference suppression is much better.
I'm reminded of a time when I made a minor mistake laying out a board, and three address pins got added in the wrong order - I was grousing about "I'm gonna have to build a little 'bunk bed' adapter to rearrange the pins…" when my business partner said, "No you don't - we just move the bytes around in software. So long as address pins on the ROM go to address pins on the CPU and data pins on the ROM go to data pins on the CPU, we can massage the Intel Hex files with a tool to make the right bits appear where the CPU expects them." There's a reason we continue to work together 30 years later.
Is it actually true that the hex files needed touching up, I would think if the wires for the address are out of order they would get stored out of order but then put back correct when you were reading it back.
That was my first thought when I saw the remapping diagram, only to realise it wasn’t just the address or data lines.
We had an issue when making a cartridge adapter for a ROM emulator. My boss at the time had the genius idea to use the Address pins to latch data into hidden registers so that we could mux in our own ROM image. I designed the FPGA and statemachines all in schematics (Xilinx 3042). Fun times!
@@ZakKohler If it's RAM you can generally put the address and data pins in any order. It's a problem if it's a memory you program externally before mounting on the board, like ROM or EPROM. Then correcting the hex file would make the programmed data match the board's wiring.
awesome first computer kit
Seeing a Data IO 29B is always very interesting, the same goes for the Dolch too which I used in the late 90s + early 2Ks. SC/MP and repair etc was nice too but for me, the most interesting part was the fact that he was able to keep that kit and his notes from 1976. That's from when he was 12 years old. Also, he was either in Belgium or France at that time so this stuff did not get lost throughout all this time even after moving to another continent. That is just fascinating.
I eagerly followed the introduction of all the early microprocessors, starting with the Intel 4004, and collected all the data sheets and manuals.The first documentation for the SC/MP actually referred to it as the Simple _Cheap_ Micro Processor, so I suspect the engineers who named it that also called it _SCAMP._ Sadly, _Cheap_ was soon changed to _Cost-effective,_ which for me made the thing much less appealing.
The old cookie tin most likely shielded RF from your SC/MP better than the plexiglas did :)
Your excitement when it turned on really made my night!
You bet, I was so relieved it worked! It was a bit of a long shot. If this had not worked, I was not looking forward to a time consuming logic analyzer debug...
CuriousMarc
Well done. ;)
I've done that many times when getting excited to power up a device after repair - forgetting to plug it in. lol
You're a braver man than I, though - entering the hex manually on the EPROM burner. :p
Did you also read the contents of the buffer into the PC first, just to make a backup?
(just a bit of OCD on my behalf, as I would have typed it into the PC. To be fair, the keypad on your burner looks much nicer than the average PC keyboard. hehe)
Amazing work on the Alto btw.
I followed the whole series from start to finish, and couldn't wait to watch the next episode.
Yes, typed it on the burner because of the much better (Cherry keys!) keypad and auto address numbering. Downloaded it to the PC afterwards and will give it to Al so he can post on bitsavers.org.
doesn't the dolch keyboard use cherry keys too? (they might be a different variety of cherry keys though.)
Some Dolch keyboards do, and are quite sought after apparently. Not sure if mine is one of them, does not feel very special. The ones on the Data I/O on the other hand feel awesome.
Looks like you had a soft spot for digital clocks already in your youth. Your marketing message earned you a rare but well deserved subscribe even though I eventually get to see all you videos anyway. All your videos are instructive and entertaining, thank you. A special thank you for promoting the culture of repair and reverence for older technology.
So wise of you to save your first project. I saved mine too (a guitar amplifier; all tube). Some time back I had considered re-vamping it, but I'm so glad I did not do that and left it as I made it as a means of seeing how far I'd come since then (12 years ago or so). Still sounds pretty good. For 14 that's very impressive what you have there; code and embedded stuff has never been my strong suit; but as a 90s kid, I definitely appreciate computers/gaming consoles and love how far back in history you find these things in your collection . Admittedly, I explore it vicariously through your channel given what you have from teletypes to that Alto which was quite the project. Love your test gear repairs also.
"It's a great keypad" I love your positive thinking! Congratulations!
Knowing where we have come from and how we got there is an integral part of where we are and where we are going. It's important that future generations know how all this came into existence. You are keeping a living record and schematics of the machinery that brought us into this century. Much thanks for the Herculean effort it takes to bring this technology back from the grave.
Very much enjoyed this Marc. One detail that caught my attention was that your hand written assembly code had comments in English. Impressive not only for being a young kid doing this but being fluently bi-lingual.
I wish, but I wasn't that good at English then. I added the English comments just before doing the video as I was reviewing the notes, trying to find out what these hex codes were standing for...
Ah well, your secret is safe with me :) I am just a few years younger than you I think and still fluently mono-lingual (I did study French but remember very little).
One thing I really like about programming in assembly is that if your program is of any length you are forced to write good comments as you have no hope weeks (or decades :) ) later deciphering what you were trying to do and why.
I will now subscribe to CuriouS NArC :)
Wow! My first program was also music on a SC/MP. We didn't have the kit, my father built a SC/MP based pc with keyboard and screen. My first program was copied from an electronics magazine. I then expanded it using the three flag outputs to provide 7 volume levels. All stored on tape at 300 baud.
I am very impressed and it is just wonderful that you restored this little piece of your history. The fact that you even went through the trouble/fun of even finishing what you didn't do back then to show the result, wow, I love it. Thank you Marc!
There's something about those LED displays isn't there... Lovely to see you get your old kit up and running. Must have scratched an old itch to fix that bug in the scrolling routine too!
The red LED display was so amazing...the LED version was a 1970's thing, but I was surprised to learn that the seven-segment representation of figures can be found in patents as early as 1903.
Absolutely love seeing old things still work and usable
Loved this. Incredible you kept all your listings with it. 🙏
I too was building SCAMP microprocessor boards around about 1976, I was twenty years old and working for the British Government. They saw where the future lay and let me buy what I needed to get my prototypes up and running. I too used pins on the bottom of the board which I soldered enameled wire (wrapped around the pin) just heating the pin / wire up until the flux melted the enamel and joined the wire to the pin. The wire was on a spool at the top of a pen and you could zig zag your way around the board to the next junction. Fun days !
Cool, this reminds me of working with Motorola 68c705 at school, we had to program it to do a bunch of different things, one interesting task we had was to create a program in assembler in it to make a calculator which also did square root. The 68c705 only has addition and flip. I well remember the feeling when I figured out how quicker than anyone else in class :-). Now I am a professional developer as of many years.
In France in the 80's thousands and thousands of 68705p3 where used to decrypt pay tv (C+)....
Around 1975 my first boss bought an SC/MP for himself to explore, and got me hooked.
Soon after I bought and assembled a Signetics 2650 'system' with my own kit serial terminal(!)
The company moved on from massive TTL controllers to small PDP-11s, and eventually moved up to them, Z80s, and worked for both DEC and Zilog for short periods!!! More recently I've been working (mostly for fun) with PUCs and Atmel processors on my own hardware platforms. What a memory seeing your 'tin can'. Thanks.
J'adore. Au debut des années 80 je faisais la même chose avec mon TRS80 coco. Que d'heures passées a programmer en assembler. :-)
I'm a big follower. Perfect channel for a nostalgic like myself :-)
I used the same squared paper to write my first assembly programs for the C64.
Great you got it working again. As a student of computer sciences I always enjoy your videos a lot. Thanks for sharing!
I especially like your videos about old HP devices. I've got into collecting HP calculators and alike some years ago but they are very very hard find here in Germany...
Greetings, have a nice... evening, I guess?
Nice, good to see you got it going. These were probably the best intro to micros, not like today's PC's where all the magic is buried is endless libraries and super complicated operating systems.
That clock was seriously impressive. Consider me seriously impressed.
I had always wondered how those worked. I remember seeing them in magazines. Thanks.
Marc, think of where you've come since making this video... AGC, Xerox Alto, Soviet clock, Globus, Teletypes, resurrecting innumerable pieces of HP equipment, Apollo Comms and many other such video. Keep up the great work keeping history alive.
WOW! I had in 1985 first DIY microcomputer made from calculator keyboard, Z80 CPU, 2x2114 SRAM, 2KB EPROM and calculator 9 digit mux led display. Big problem was burning EPROM byte after byte using transistor monostable timer and switches for address and data bus. In Poland these parts was hardly accessible, mostly from decommissioned hardware. Hand assembly EPROM had simple monitor program for hex programming own programs, however no mass storage. Assembling was made on paper to hex form and write sequentially in monitor. ROM was decoded at bottom and RAM at 0x8000 ) just no decoder but A15 was used to enable proper memory. First run was memorable day.
My first computer was a SC/MP Board too! Hex keyboard was included standard. Memory was only 128 bytes however...
I later added the cassette recorder interface as well!
Of cause I wrote a music program too.
I must still have it somewhere. I threw away many computers over the years, but not this one!😊
Like your binder with mnemonic code that you manually convert into hex.
Had a course in college in the 70's that used the SC/MP, and yes, we called is SCAMP back then. I was the only one in my lab group that could comprehend it, so the two girls would rub my back to as I hunched over the thing for an hour to get it to do something!
Tears in my eyes! My first one also, made from a kit.
My first boss bought that exact basic kit..., and that started me on a 40 year journey. I never bought a SCAMP !
I love the story of the kit, and that you've got it from a friend of your father
My first computer was a single-card system (assembly required) based on the TMS-9900 (T.I.). That was a really cool 16-bit chip that used memory for general purpose registers. When I got all of the chips soldered down the thing didn't work. One of my college professors who was very supportive asked a friend at the local NASA facility to help out. They had a Gould Biomation logic analyzer which is exactly what was needed to debug the beast. After taking a look-see we found the problem in about 2 hours and fixed it. The system had only 4k ram, as I recall, and no way to store programs (like a cassette) so it didn't do me much good. But it was quite an experience to learn about logic analyzers, which I had no idea existed, and do some
live debugging. The TMS 9900 probably wasn't any record setter in terms of performance but it intrigued me that it had a 16-bit ALU when everything else was 8-bit.
I got a TMS 9900 board as my second computer! Still have it, but have not made a video on it.
I wish I kept my stuff from back in 1974 when I started into this wonderland!
You earned my sub after keying in all that machine code
CuriosNarc souns like a completely different channel
My 15th Birthday present in 1978 was the Sinclair MK14 SC/MP kit, unfortunately, I don't have it anymore, but I do have a SC/MP processor still and all the extra ram I bought. A whole 1K!
Wow. 1k! You're never going to use all of it.
Very awesome. I started my digital career in 1977. And also with a SC/MP
...and I've never heared of the scamp before. I can imagine this device was very high-end and nerdy at that time (still is though). you are fromy Germany?
Ing. Max Koschuh My SC/MP was an ELEKTOR-project in Germany. Extremely nerdy😀
@curiousmarc we must be similar ages since my first computer experience was also on SC/MP. When you loaded 0xC4 in the video my brain just said "load immediate" just as you said it. My machine was something called a "Nanokit" - South African made. www.retro.co.za/ccc/NANOKIT/ 256 bytes of ram. No ROM - had a front panel to load code. My first programs - like you - a tune player (think I did the school song). And a clock (also by laborious cycle counting). Thanks for taking me back in my memory.
Dolch and the UniPak 2, what a beautiful combination.
That was a rather advanced project for a 14 year old Marc. You would have been a rock star... I was building 8-bit CMOS projects at age 14 with my "Engineers Notebook" by Forest Mims III. I still have that book with all my notes. I never could have imagined that one day I would own a 64 bit PC with 32 Gig of RAM that would fit in my backpack.
Great video, it made me remember the old good days when I programmed my first computer kit based on Z80 processor and having 1KB of RAM. I wrote the programs on the same squared paper and, yes I made the same programs: the clock, the scrolling display and music flipping a bit of I/O Port. I still have the boards of my computer, one day or another I'll bring them all together, with a video hopefully
Amazing. Nice bit of reserection.
How fun that must've been. My first PC was a Tandy 1000 HX and I made music play, but with BASIC. :)
There's a vintage book about building a "SCAMP" computer that I bought when I was a kid.- "How to design, build, & program your own working computer system" by Robert Haviland
I just read "How To Build Your Own Working Microcomputer" by Charles K. Adams. You really could build your own using this book. It's 8080 based, but that really doesn't matter that much.
Online version (mine is "dead tree").
archive.org/details/How.To.Build.Your.Own.Working.Microcomputer/page/n3
Excellent! We used to make music with the Data General Nova 1200 at the Lawrence Hall of Science in 1973-ish!
Very nice video. I didn't think that anyone would remember the old SC/MP CPU.
I adapted an EPROM to a ROM socket on an Apple//e. I stacked two sockets and brought the pins out the sides to be juggled with other pins. It worked okay, and allowed us to do things in the monitor that a regular //e couldn't do.
I found your channel through the AGC videos, but lately I've been having a marvelous time geeking out on some of your other videos! You've well earned my sub, sir!
I got a similar device, based on the eastern germany Z80 clone U880 . It is called LC80 (short for "Lern Computer 80") . That one I wanted since I was a child but had to wait for 20 years before a friend found one by accident and gave it to me as a present. It felt like I had received one of the best presents ever! Would be nice if things like yours or the LC80 were still available for young people today, because they are not as fancy as arduino stuff but teach a lot better how a CPU is actually doing its work.
I had a vague idea of it was like to load the hex code on earlier processors by hand, this was quite instructive. Thanks
Nice restoration. Thanks for sharing.
Great video - thank! The SC/MP was also the processor in the 'SCRUMPI' kit from Bywood Electronics, UK - my first 'home computer' kit. Great for learning about microprocessors and coding. The 'SCRUMPI II' kit used the Mk II version of the chip, and also had more RAM etc. After that, I upgraded to a rather more sophisticated home-designed 6809-based system, and wrote quite a bit of code for that as well. All Hex entry - no assembler! Fun times!
That clock app is very cool - genius idea of timing the instructions, to act as a regular cycle for the seconds.
I was loaned a homebrew SC/MP during my high school years. Mine had black slide switches to set the address, and nine red push buttons to set the data byte: eight bit toggles and one clear-all (I'm pretty sure). I was handed the board after a 3-minute explanation of hexadecimal, and soon found myself working long into the wee hours trying to get my first loop working, because I had to figure out two's complement _after_ the PC is incremented. Hex is one thing, two's complement is another thing.
Why increment the PC after fetching an unconditional branch instruction if you're not going to use the result?
This is what they call "beginner eyes". Sometimes beginner eyes is romantic, other times it's a PITA.
Really like your universal programmer very nice bit of gear. I have just bought a Z80 computer kit and looking forward to building in. Regards Chris
You should obtain the source code for CP/M for it. I ran CP/M and MP/M for 2 decades
I would like to give this video TWO thumbs up after seeing how you fixed it.
Fun how the scrolling goes faster for each of the last few letters that clears :)
What a really excellent video! I am building a Sinclair MK14 SC/MP clone to try and re-capture my youth. You should post your programs! Thank you Marc, a really enjoyable little show.
I remembered this computer when I read "Practical Electronics" magazine in the 198x issue about a capacitor tester using SC/MP computer on the "Ingenuity Unlimited" column of the magazine.
The set up was very simple just using a CD4016 and an inverter chip. As I dont own a SC/MP computer and I've already bought a Ohio Scientific Ind C1P Superboard, I decided to convert the program to 6502 codes and display the result on the monitor screen. But it didn't work on my OSI. Now 30 years has passed, I think you might try it on your SC/MP. I'll dig out the magazine and show the listing here if you're interested.
Not sure how to upload a picture (schematic) here though.
I just found the issue carrying the article. It was in the micro-bus by DJD of practical electronics 1980/June issue. Looks like there's an extra 4081 chip I've forgotten. The article can be downloaded here...
www.americanradiohistory.com/Practical_Electronics.htm
Allen
Thanks! It’s worth a try. Although I’m not sure using a CMOS AND gate as an improvised comparator is going to give you any reproducible precision... These were the good times when you actually had to build little cheap analog circuits to make gadgets. France had a similar publication called “Radio Plans”. I would devour every new issue. That’s how I learned electronics basically. Elektor was a large step above, catering to professionals, with truly engineered circuits. Their circuits were more complex and expensive and outside the reach of my limited kid’s budget and lab equipment. Even the publication itself was too expensive for me! It all pretty much died when personal computers and microprocessors became commonplace and software and games overtook hardware...
Brilliant. My first was the MK14, 256bytes and m/c code only, great days.
Great video, great tool for computer fundamentals.
I've seen these SC/MP kits.. the first company I worked for (Video Data Systems) made a video titler around SC/MP and they had one of these kits for development. I liked the calculator for keyboard and display device. They switched to Motorola for subsequent products (I programmed 6800s and 6809s for them in the 80s).
exciting story. thanks for sharing.
I remember the name Video Data systems for any reason.
My first home built computer was based on an 8085 - I still have it and it still works too!
Was at college and bought myself an Acorn System 1.... fun times!
Very nice video - I really appreciate your showing old time tech . . .
Love your work Marc! Wish I kept my Z80 based kit computer I made in the late 80’s or was it it early 90’s, anyway somewhere in the shifts between houses it got lost. Love the fact you can find your roots in your computing history.
Love the Data I/O UniPac. Could you give us more info on it - perhaps a video?
That's a great piece of vintage professional hardware. It gave me a hard time, I have a whole playlist on restoring it (see link in video description). Here is the first of the series: ua-cam.com/video/iYxf1etUIR0/v-deo.html
Wonderful, I remember this world well
wow very cool, i loved growing up in the early days of computing it was fun experimenting with the simple stuff. thou i always dreamed of more advanced stuff being avail one day when i was older and more $$
Cool kit, I built one of the RCA COSMAC ELF kits back in my high school days, eventually, I cannibalized it for parts, and don't still have it, but I do still have the original microprocessor and the original 1861 pixie graphics chip. A while back, I built a reproduction kit for this, The ELF 2000 from spare Time Gizmos, and used the old microprocessor and graphics chip and they still work to this day. Trying to learn 1802 assembly again, at 60 years old I'm not sure my brain will handle it.
I love the video! This brings back a lot of memories for me. 1976-77 I did the same things.
That‘s awesome! Really liked it. Watched ist several times now! Wow.
My first project was a digital clock when I was 13 in 1982. I started about 15 chips and later I learned to build AND and OR using dioids and resistors. I think I ended up using 8 ICs. These parts were expensive in Iran and a simple CMOS gate IC like 4011 would cost me a week of my pocket money. Like you, I retrieved my project from my parents garage while ago, but I never got a reason to bring it to life. Interestingly I took some French the same year in high school but I can't remember anything from that French class. I still can count to ten in French and I learned that from my classmate the year before!
Love it! It's so much like my own experience but for me it was a KIM-1 mostly preassembled. Still just a modest amount of memory and a 6 digit 7 segment calculator display with Hex keypad. I also did a lot of audio based creations. I was excited to see you repair your kit and fix a bug! I'm also realizing an old project by making a game today for Kim-1 that I wanted as a child.
Love your videos. Happy holidays!
Very nice. I built a dedicated 8085 uP based circuit in 1983, which emulated a grandfather clock. We had amplified chimes on loan from Schulmerich (sadly we had to give them back), and I used a counter-timer chip and decade dividers to make the clock function. I think the UV erasable PROMs are fried by now and my documentation is not as good as yours.
The only time i've ever been strong armed into subscribing.
Wow! I heard of the Scamp back in the day... It's great you still have it and the ability to fix it and program it :)
Z80A Assembly language always drove me up the walls I much prefare AT&T assembly language programming for the 80586.
Yes, the 8080 and Z80 all had to live with the legacy of the 8008, which in turn was made to implement the instruction set of the Datapoint 2200 terminal, resulting in the contrived and unpalatable instruction set (to this day!). In comparison, the National SC/MP set and the Motorola 6800 are far cleaner and logical, to the point that you could program the SC/MP directly in hex code without an assembler as I do here. Unfortunately, that appears to be the sole redeeming feature of the SC/MP...
I wrote thousands hundreds of thousands of lines of assembler code for the 8080/z80 processors.
I built the Altair in 1975 connected to a KSR-33 teletype. I MUCH prefer the IBM mainframe instruction set to the toys of the Intel line, which they haven't improved as of today from the 8088! All brain dead!
My first was a lowly VIC-20 1982, but I learned to program in BASIC with it. I acquired an Apple ][e in 1983.
BRILIIANT. My boss started on the 6800 and put a battery to the RAM chip to hold the programs. It was a mod over a kit from Motorola. He told me this thing was sky expensive back in his days. I learned ASM on the 8051, but at a point were silicon was getting cheap and memory inexpensive so by two years C was the standard, even for the old 8051 thing. Never inputed machine code though. However the tools were pretty basic. Avocet ASM compiler and linker, you need to compile at the comand promt and look for the errors on another file. Debug was just impossible. Even the AVOCET thing had issues with large segments of constant data (large, 40 or 50 bytes) LOL, long nights of cursing. After a long fight I decided to hock the board to a parallel port and use the HW isr on its highest priority and wrote cryptic PC program to read and write any location of RAM so I can have a look or change the program flow playing with the right location. This save me a lot of time. Of course the microcontroller has a small piece of code to run the not-always-reliable PC comunication ... LOL. The great times.
Having owned an SC/MP based MK14 for all of its life (and a not insignificant portion of mine), I really like this video. I hadn't realised how heavily derived from this kit the the MK14 actually was - the monitor / OS looks identical to the 'early' version MK14 OS, although the MK14 later acquired a much improved monitor, the one with the "0000 00" reset prompt, as opposed to the one with the "dashes" prompt as seen here. As an electronics hobbyist I used mine in much the same way as I still use things like Arduinos now. I give the MK14 a run out every now and then, and a few years back I made a serial download programming interface for it, as seen here:-
ua-cam.com/video/j1WSy_ueX34/v-deo.html
It's great to see like-minded others keeping these old systems alive.
It's not so much "heavily derived" as exact copy :) Ian Williamson had designed an SC/MP machine that worked by hacking a calculator display and keyboard, but when Sinclair went to NS for parts they offered him the design for free provided he used NS parts. The difference in the MK14 is they threw away the unused bits. The Introkit was originally a serial I/O trainer for the SC/MP ; NS provided a conversion kit, a wirewrapped board that replaced chunks of it to provide things like the keyboard interface.
Hello Paul ('The' Paul Robson?) - yes, I've since seen examples of the Introkit at Bletchley (The National Museum of computing) and I saw that the most basic form of the Introkit only had serial / TTY input/output, the keypad / display interface being added on the 'breadboard' part of the Introkit, usually using wire-wrap construction. I guess we MK14 owners had it a little easier, or we would have, if the MK14 keypads actually worked. :-)
Bonjour Marc,
J'avais des doutes sur l'origine de votre accent et cela m'a intrigué. C'est bon de le savoir enfin. J'ai fait mes études en France il y'a quelques années maintenant.
Bon travail et on reste curieux.
Merci!
Paul N. JAPP Je me suis toujours posé la même question xD
je parle francais et anglais
Vive le français!
Ok, I've subscribed to CuriousNarc
It did the job! Subscribed!
Also MY first microprocessor (though I don't think my keypad was like that). I too called it SC/MP - no scamps for me :)
Beautiful.
oh god i just woke upat mignight to this.
Drinking my tea laughing hard, I am looing up this kit.
A cool way to learn programming microcode.
Well, i'm from the same time period, but mine wasn't a SC/MP (although I knew of it and had seen one in operation), but instead I bought the more promising (and "better") KIM-1, which was fully built (although I had to design a power supply and an enclosure for it). But It had the much better 6502 CPU. I also had a friend that used the 1802 based ELF board, and it could play music too, especially the "bumble bee" song, very nice. (I still own a long play record with computer music that includes this song) Another friend had a system with a VDP and it could run the "game of life" program. Good times where I did many "home visits" of other computer enthusiasts.
I like your "Tin Can" SC/MP - I'm sure you learnt a lot from that.
Reminds me a lot of the KIM-1! :D I love it! I wish my first computer was as awesome as this. :D (A couple years ago, I hacked a Novus 750 calculator, which looks just like your control panel for this one, and interfaced it to an Arduino, running a modified version of the KIM-UNO firmware, emulating a KIM-1 on the same kind of display... but pocket-sized. :D )
Thats amazing, i started with a Seiko UC-2000 basic programmable watch in the early 80s
Awesome, I love old hex computer kits
Wonderful! I'm always thinking about resurrecting my first computer, a RatShak Model One... but I'm afraid of the cassette, it wasn't reliable. I had it running editor-assembler (EDTASM)... did some amazing things with it (made my own prom burner, for one). Thanks for what you do Marc.
You deserve a medal for bringing it back to life!