A Robot and Some PCs

My experimenting in electronics goes back to the days of catwhiskers and vacuum tubes. Moving past the catwhiskers, I built everything from simple one tube radios to television sets when they came along some years later. Somewhere along the way came the printed circuit board with its transistors and ICs. The only "hard wiring" was now just between the boards. It was a vast improvement. I built stereos, oscilloscopes and other test equipment, numerous gizmos, and finally my first color TV. In some ways the hobby had become simpler for you could now buy kits with all the parts included but soldering the thousands and thousands of parts was a painstaking and time-consuming task. Actually it was some time in the 50s that I was introduced to Heathkit, the famous manufacturer of electronic kits. They had been in the electronic kit business since the 40s and I must have known about them but I didn't get aound to checking them out until the late 50s. Anyway, it was quite natural to move on to computers when they came along in the 70s.

The first computer I actually owned was a Radio Shack TRS-80 color computer. You just hooked it up to a TV and you were in business. As I remember it, many of the personal computers were coming out in kit form but for some reason I never got around to tackling them. I procrastinated for a few years until I decided to buy one ready made somewhere in the early 80s. In 1983 I finally decided to try my luck at building something with a microprocessor. It was the Heathkit ET-18-A Hero 1 robot. Hero 1 was equipped with a Motorola 6808 CPU and could sense light, sounds, motion and had sonar which allowed it to move about randomly without bumping into things. It could also sing and talk. Once I got it built it became a great hit with all the little kids--and some not so little. It still is in fact but I need batteries for it. One of these days I'm going to have to get off my duff and look around for the type of gel batteries it needs. Heathkit is no longer in the business of making kits for robots or other electronic gear for that matter. But they're still in the educational business. They can be checked out at Heathkit Educational Systems . The demise of Heathkit as a supplier of do-it-yourself kits was something of a blow to us older types.

I could easily devote a whole page to Hero, and perhaps one day I will, but for now I'll try to be brief. Hero could be programed a several ways foremost being the top mounted hexadecimal keypad into which machine language could be entered. There was also a teaching pendant that would control motor and arm movements. Then there was the remote radio control. And all programs in memory could be saved on cassette tape. It soon became clear to me that the best method would be to link it to a host computer with a RS-232 interface and the programs could be saved on floppy disk. Also I could do the programing in Wintek Basic instead of the combersome machine language. At some point along here I had already started work on what was to be my first IBM compatible XT. It was the Heathkit HS-151. The wiring harnesses were now gone and the cards simply plugged into the motherboard as they do to this day. [Actually the HS-151 had a passive backplane into which all the boards were plugged.] It still took months of every spare minute to solder all the seemingly endless components to the boards. When I first fired it up I had 256K of RAM and two 360K floppy drives. I soon built another board to bring the memory up to the full 640K. A little later I added a 10M Winchester drive--as hard drives were commonly known then--and I had no problem programing Hero. Every kid who came to my house would receive a personal greeting from the little fellow.

I tinkered with Hero for a couple of years, adding just about everything that could be added. A EPROM burner I built made it possible for me burn in custom programs I could use in such places as my backyard patio--Hero does not run well on grass. But the 90s were rapidly approaching. I was going to retire and I had no intention of living in the city after that. I had some property up north in Muskoka and I started building a house on it. This took up my time for the next few years. Because I was still working I hired people to do the main framing but I did much of the work myself--but this is getting away off topic. I was fully retired for more than two years before I got around to tackling the heaps of electronic junk I had in my garage and basement. Computers were moving upward by leaps and bounds but the best my junk pile could produce was a 286 I had gotten somewhere. So I went out and bought a 486 SX 25 and recommissioned the 286 and my faithful XT and I was in computers again.

There was no local internet provider in my area at that time so my knowledge about the internet was limited to what I read in the papers. But I had tons of programs downloaded from bulletin boards during my city days--most of which I had never even looked at. While fooling around with these programs my XT developed a memory parity problem. The problem turned out to be in a single chip but nowhere in my junk piles was there a replacement. I had been a frequenter of junk shops so I went down to Toronto to look at some of my old haunts. I didn't find what I was looking for but I did find a place with a several skids of old IBM XTs. If I took at least a half a dozen of them the guy would let me have them at 15 bucks apiece--as is of course. So I picked out half a dozen cases with lots of boards in them and headed for home. Surely three or four working computers could be made up from them. To my surprise all six were working in no time at all--and I had a pile of boards left over. All I needed now was more keyboards and monitors.

I got a few down in the city for reasonable prices but I soon discovered that old computers and everything that goes with them can be had for very little at yard and garage sales during the summer months. Some people just want to get rid of them--particularly if their kids have told them that these machines are obsolete and totally useless in this day and age. So what would an old guy like myself do with all these computers? Well, I have nephews and nieces with kids going to school so I felt they should have computers of their own. XTs and such make great word processors and can take care of most functions--only at a slower speed. However, the kids soon grow tired of them and look upon them as ancient relics. And an upgrade is called for. Times move pretty fast these days. It's not so long ago that a 30 MEG hard drive was considered all a person would ever need. Today it's in the gigabytes.

And today I'm still tinkering with my computers. My fully operational systems range from XTs to pentiums and many more could be assembled from my junk pile. Perhaps one day I will get around to setting up my own personal museum of sorts in my basement. It's a great hobby--particlarly during the long winter months up here in Muskoka--and I certainly recommend it to anyone with time on their hands. Everyone--young or old--should have a hobby, even if it's just flying a kite. Surfing the internet is certainly a hobby. It takes very little physical effort and a perfectly good 486 system can be had at a very reasonable price. And if one is really on a budget, that old dinosaur, the XT, can do the trick. All one needs is a shell account and a bit of text based software.You won't get the fancy pictures but all the text is still there. But enough of this for now. I welcome anyone who cares to comment.

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