Bertil Holmberg

The Sork taught himself programming on an Intel 8008, using a clanky Teletype to enter the assembler code for the game of Life. Then came the 8080 which required both positive and neagtive power supplies, ouch! I was much happier with the orthogonal design of the Motorola 6800 that would lead to the 68000 and the Macintosh. While waiting for this, I built my own kit around a Motorola 6800 prototyping board. In time, my homebrew computer grew to have 12 kB RAM, a VDU and a hard sectored Shugart SA400 floppy disk drive, both controlled by my own hardware. A bootstrap EPROM made it possible to load FORTH from a floppy. On the side, I had an ADDO paper tape punch and a manual optical tape reader, as well as a small printer.

The Teletype paper tapes are long gone, but I still have this 30 year old printout of a 8008 code snippet. Those numbers certainly look like octals don’t they?!

Paper tapes may be old technology, but unlike most magnetic and plastic media this relic is likely to be readable even in the next century.

The IBM PC didn’t impress me at all, it was expensive, and used command line input, just like my own kit. And it paled completely when compared to the Apple Lisa. Then came the Macintosh that was the Lisa for the rest of us. I received mine in September 1984 and the original two binder set of Inside Macintosh not long after. The rest is history.

My hovercraft is full of eels.