Folks who roll their own computers seem to gravitate to *nix computers.
Perhaps it is the responsiveness to tinkering?

The following random thoughts are mostly to share fond memories with
other longtime computer/Linux hackers.

In the personal roll-your-own wire-wrap category:
sc/mp from national, 256 bytes of ram, toggle switch input.
TI bit slice components, 74181 and related support components,
ran from 1702 boot. An interesting note, the processor inside the Diablo
printer!
Like almost everybody doing home computers in the 70's; Z80 stuff machines
out
the who-ha. this critter refreshed its own dram so it was fairly painless to
put in 64k memory.

Depending on your scrounging abilities, your software distros were paper or
mag tape.
The 4K tiny basic was the most uasable language on my altair.

As for scrounged computers, a fair number of the folks in town belonged to
the club
organized by Richard Koplow in the basement of the resource access center.
They had bunches of donated hardware that they were trying to get running
for local non-profit groups.
I spent many happy hours playing with some of these boxes - my favorite was
the BIT-483.
This thing had variable word length - you could have a 1000 byte words
controlled directly by hardware.
And 2 x 8K Fabritec core stacks! When you keyed in a program it stayed
across power downs. Yum!

Mark Browne

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Horejsi" <shorejsi at skypoint.com>
To: <tclug-list at mn-linux.org>
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2002 8:30 PM
Subject: Re: [TCLUG] IBM history


  OK, can't resist the urge to swap old computer stories any longer.

<snip>

  My first 'PC' was a wire-wrapped 8080A (2MHz!) based machine of my own
design. (I still have it in a box in the basement.) It had a whopping 4K
of RAM (the premium 650ns stuff) and unlike the Altair/IMSAI kits of the
day, it had seven-segment LEDs and a Hex keypad for I/O rather than the
usual discrete LEDs and bit switches. I know it sounds weird but I don't
recall ever running out of memory; keying in code in hex made you
appreciate efficient design I guess...

<snip>