Amiga Blast from the past

There was a time when amiga used to capure my imagination.

The people who did the Amiga chips are the same ones who designed the custom chips in the Atari 8 bits.

I still have the hardeware reference notes for the Atari’s complete with detailed fold out curcuit diagrams.

People may have heard of the ANTIC and GTIA display chips but the busiest of the lot was POKEY (potentiomiter/keyboard)

This chip contained the keyboard controler, 8 channel analogue to digital converter for reading the paddle controlers, 4 variable timers with interrupt ability, IRQ control, and 4 channel sound !

I am envious of all you guys who grew up with the original computers, learning how to use code on the way. I did not use a computer until my late 50’s, and have often wished that I had taken time out to see what it was all about.

However, I was busy doing all kinds of other stuff and having some (often heavy) life experiences on the way. No point in regrets I guess, and I have learned a heck of a lot since that first beige box, with a Cyrix 586 and a whole 8MB of memory! Then I bought better bits and built a better PC, using these as well as floppies, remember them? –

I had 10 of them, then read about the “Click of Death” and formatted them, sold them, bought a bigger Hdd (whole 8GB!) I carried on learning, building and picking up so much from MM and the forum, still learning and getting help from all the good voices here. I just wish I had learned from the ‘bottom up’ but life is what it is I guess.

Another chip in the 8 bit Atari’s was a standard motorola GPIO. This was wired out to the joystick ports and was fully software programable for input or output.

At the time I connected up a couple of my own project boards and wondered why nobody else seemed interested.

Now we have the raspery Pi and people rave about it ?

You have a point Ed

At the time I was doing part 1 of a City & Guilds 224 in radio and TV electronics and part of the practical exam was to solder up a tag board. Another part was soldering a simple circuit on Vero board.

We used a small tipped 15W iron but it was still a pain.

On the other hand we used bread boards for a lot of our class work.

Wow, this got me thinking, and I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGloVvN9NXY.

Whilst interesting historically, more so for me, since I learned to program on an ICL 2966 (using COBOL) which is featured.

Just realised how old I am.

@johnbarry. I followed the link and noticed “This item does not ship to Haverfordwest, United Kingdom. ”

Now, I’m not even close to Havorfordwest (England rather than Wales for a start), and so it’s not a personalised message. What do you suppose they have against a Welsh town?

Oops try again

I did mean you were LUCKY to have the springs JayCee. I had screw caps and wood screws.