I always served two masters: hardware and software. In the early part of my career, I designed mostly hardware, such as control systems, computer interfaces, and data acquisition. Over time, there was greater demand for software, so that’s what I do for a living today. These days, hardware is more of a hobby than a profit center.
Recently, my interest in hardware has re-emerged. Fortunately, I’ve set up a nice bench with test equipment and soldering iron ready for action. I’ve been meaning to document some of circuits I’m working on. This article is a step in that direction.
I was cleaning out some old computer equipment from my parents house over the weekend and I found some real relics. There were numerous monitors, printers, scanners and the like. There was also Callan Unistar lurking in there (early 68k based Sys V Unix box). The processor board failed years ago. A DEC Alpha machine was there also. The real find was one of the original 128k Macs that my brother purchased in 1984. It’s actually a “fat mac”. The memory was upgraded to 512k by yours truly. It was one of our guinea pigs for a fly by night Mac upgrade business we were running in those days. I recall that it didn’t boot after soldering IC sockets (the original Mac had no sockets for memory). That was painful, but after removing all the sockets and resoldering with greater care, it worked. It’s a shame to toss out that piece of history. If you want it, let me know.
In a related note, I just purchased a new iMac and it is fantastic! It took only two days for delivery, which was really nice. If you read my previous post, it’s no surprise that I have just about had it with Windows. After talking with several colleagues, it seems that XP just doesn’t work smoothly with multiple users and I’m not about to figure out why.
The new Intel Macs are really nice. The LCD monitor is bright and crisp. The speed is excellent, maybe twice as fast as my 1.6 GHz pentium. The price is quite reasonable also. With Parallels Desktop, you can run Windows, Linux, and whatever else you like all at once. Macs are back and now it’s no longer an either-or proposition. BTW, Apple stock is up after the much anticipated announcement of the iPhone.