Steve Robertson wrote: There are two books "How to Design, Build And Program Your Own Working Computer System" (1979) and "How to Design, Build And Program Your Own Advanced Working Computer System" (1981) ("Advanced" is actually underlined), by the same author, and both from TAB books. The second book continues with some expansion ideas for an SC/MP based system, and then has some chapters discussing the Z80 and INS8073 processors. They are kind of weird books IMHO. As construction books I find them somewhat lacking. There is no complete schematic or board layouts, more like back-of-the-envelope snippets, now you figure out the details (a criticism I'd level at a lot of TAB books from the 60s/70s, actually). One has to do a lot of interpolation between the book and what might be a final, complete system. I'd almost be surprised if anyone actually built a system from the book, or alternately, someone who was competent to build such a system from the info provided didn't need the book. I keep them around, not with the intention of ever building such a system from them, but as historical examples of hobbyist computing from the period, although they were arguably 2-or-so years out-of-date relative to the market by the time they were published. They are more in line with what I would have expected to see published around 1976-77. They do have some other perhaps helpful sections for reference about such things as interfacing to current-loop TTYs, etc.

On Thursday 23 October 2008 16:02, James Wilson wrote: I have both of these somewhere, and the titles are not exactly the same, though they're pretty close. I've been posting a few odd books here and there over on amazon, it hadn't occurred to me to get into the TAB books yet (or I haven't encountered that box yet :-). Yes, there are many errors in them. Lots of typos, and lots of blatant errors too, that seemed to be typical of the stuff from that publisher for some reason. -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin