13 Dec
2005
13 Dec
'05
3:45 p.m.
Building a 6809 CUBIX machine does sound fun. I've
been looking for a smaller
project I can work with over time; I keep getting older computers (mostly sun
or macintosh) and fixing them up, but then they're cleaned up and running and
I get bored with them.
I'm not a hardware design guy though, and wirewrapping is out for me. I can do
board stuffing and soldering, so if anyone else is going to design a
"reference" pcb that people can go in on and order in some quantity to reduce
costs, I'd be up for that.
Humm.... Soldering chips on a manufactured PCB (that someone else designed)
isn't really "building your own" (although it's a step ahead of what
most people
today consider as "building a computer"). If you really want the experience,
design a system, prototype it and debug it - you will learn TONS more than you
would by soldering chips to a board. It's not nearly as hard as you might think
(start small).
Dave, are there any areas of CUBIX that you have plans
to improve or features
to add, but don't have time? If I'm going to build a little system to
softwarily tinker with, I might as well make something useful out of my
tinkering.
Possibly - Although Cubix was originally designed to be the OS for my main
computer, and by that fact is pretty close to what I envisioned. It was however
done 25+ years ago, and there is room for improvement. I'd wait until some
more people have gotten into it and see what feedback develops.
Regards,
Dave
--
dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Vintage computing equipment collector.