[Amps] Decline of homebrewing?

[John Lyles]

My first home computer was a Rockwell AIM-65 6502-based SBC, that I 
bought used, and built a separate 22 pin card cage with homemade power 
supply, wirewrapped 4K SRAM (2114), Real time clock, Serial port, and 
printer port. I could never get a 6845-based video board to work so used 
the 40 char LED line display. I used audio cassettes to save my assembly 
and object code and also Basic programs. I dug it out of the shed 2 
years ago, and sold the whole kit with all the manuals, FORTH ROM, a 
second mouse-damaged AIM-65 and my homemade boards on Epay. Got $400 for 
it, happy to part with that piece of history from 38 years ago.

My second PC was about 1982, when other engineers and I from work all 
bought an XT clone from SuperComputers, 8 MHz blank board, then spent 
about $1000 for all the silicon to populate it, soldered them ourselves. 
We all got them working after hours, and I had an open frame 
Wells-Gardner color monitor from an arcade game that I used with it. 
Nuts and Volts was a monthly source of parts and ideas.

After this I stuck with various motherboard upgrades, 386, 486, Pentium, 
until I finally quit building computers. RF is another story...
73
John K5PRO

On 1/6/17 8:30 AM, amps-request at contesting.com wrote:
> Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2017 10:08:36 +0000
> From: "Fuqua, Bill L" <wlfuqu00 at uky.edu>
> To: "Roger (K8RI)" <k8ri at rogerhalstead.com>, "amps at contesting.com"
> 	<amps at contesting.com>
> interesting.
> I built my first computer in 1975 some boards wirewrapped others were home done PCB a friend made for me, 6502 processor with a ascii parallel keyboard from polypacks and
> slow 2102 static ram and 1702 eprom.  output device was a model 15 TTY printer. 32k ram 1k eprom and
> a lot of clunking and chunking noises from the tty. RAM was quite expensive then. I bought 1kB (8x2102) at a time.
> 73
> Bill wa4lav

> From: Amps [amps-bounces at contesting.com] on behalf of Roger (K8RI) [k8ri at rogerhalstead.com]
> Sent: Friday, January 06, 2017 2:45 AM
>
> My first computer was an OSI running a 6502 @ 1 MHz, 48K of dynamic RAM
> and dual 8" floppies. Cost $4,000 in 1980.  (still have it - museums
> want it)