06-08-2021, 07:34 PM
Unfortunately I won't have any from 1985. I left for the UK in September 1984.
I built my first Microbee from a kit - as a poor student I couldn't afford to buy a built one. Previously to that I had built a 2650 kit from Electronics Australia, with DIP switches and LEDs on the front. I remember learning machine code with that, and the aha! moment when I understood registers etc. I still occasionally have to use those skills when debugging C++ code on Windows.
One trick I remember from the Microbee architecture was how the keyboard was scanned from the video chip, with the light pen register in the chip being loaded when a key was pressed. I used that idea in some medical hardware I developed later, for Sonicaid in the UK. They made the "machine that goes beep" (Monty Python).
I built my first Microbee from a kit - as a poor student I couldn't afford to buy a built one. Previously to that I had built a 2650 kit from Electronics Australia, with DIP switches and LEDs on the front. I remember learning machine code with that, and the aha! moment when I understood registers etc. I still occasionally have to use those skills when debugging C++ code on Windows.
One trick I remember from the Microbee architecture was how the keyboard was scanned from the video chip, with the light pen register in the chip being loaded when a key was pressed. I used that idea in some medical hardware I developed later, for Sonicaid in the UK. They made the "machine that goes beep" (Monty Python).