24 Mar
2012
24 Mar
'12
12:54 p.m.
Echoing Rod's sentiments, these are great, thanks for the effort to
make them available.
Lots of commentary about the state of affairs during that period,
such as what amounts to a chronology of the availability of ICs to
the hobbyist/consumer. The Minuteman-I/D17B is discussed. I see Don
Tarbell's name is present as early as 1968.
Even still-useful technical information, for example for somebody
wanting to do experiments with core memory today.
On 2012 Mar 22, at 12:34 PM, Lyle Bickley wrote:
The Amateur Computer Society (ACS) was founded by
Stephen B. Gray
in May, 1966. The ACS was for those who "are building or operating
a homemade computer from their home". An interesting requirement
was that the computer had to at least perform "automatic
multiplication and division". In practice, membership was open to
anyone who had a "serious" digital computer operating from their
home. In my case that included a RPC-4000 ;-)
Since I had been a member of the ACS, I had searched everywhere
online for the complete set of ACS Newsletters - and found only
isolated copies of individual newsletters.
I did find that Stephen Gray had donated his original complete set
to the Babbage Institute. Subsequently, I did a detailed search of
the Computer History Museum's (CHM) archives via their Collections
Department. I was excited to find that the CHM also had a complete
set of the ACS Newsletter. I requested that they scan and make a
PDF copy (including OCR) of same - and for a modest scanning fee
they did so. It is now available to the world (free) via CHM's
website:
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102654910
Go to the bottom of the page where there is a link to the PDF.
For those who would like to know the earliest history of "home
computers", I think you'll find it a fascinating read...