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Hi - Hugh Gibson - 06-08-2021
I've joined the forum to take a trip down memory lane.
I was involved with the Canberra MUG in the very early days and helped produce a number of the newsletters as well as writing some articles. I had a 64K MBee. I'm hoping to see the early CMG newsletters scanned in the forum.
As a hardware and software hacker (different meaning in those days) I helped improve the inbuilt Basic (probably sometime in 1984 while at Uni). I remember having a complete disassembly of the code. Got paid with a disk-drive version of the Bee. Main change I instigated was putting keywords in lower case to improve legibility; others include improving performance of the interpreter and multiplication of numbers (though my memory may be deceiving me!). I used a hardware switch on a memory address line: copied the BASIC interpreter from ROM to RAM, modified the RAM with my changes, then flicked the switch to change the address lines so the interpreter ran from RAM instead of ROM.
I'm still working in software development - in the UK.
Hugh Gibson
RE: Hi - someone - 06-08-2021
Welcome aboard Hugh!
As a true microbee owner you modded your machine.
That's the way!
RE: Hi - ChickenMan - 06-08-2021
Wow, thanks for that, always good to hear from those involved in the early work on the Microbee.
Yes we have a small collection of Canberra Microbee User Group in our Repository from Issue 1 to 45 with a few missing from 1985. You would'nt happen to have any that we have missing that could be scanned for everyone ? Go here to apply for Repo access - https://microbeetechnology.com.au/forum/showthread.php?tid=15
RE: Hi - Hugh Gibson - 06-08-2021
Unfortunately I won't have any from 1985. I left for the UK in September 1984.
I built my first Microbee from a kit - as a poor student I couldn't afford to buy a built one. Previously to that I had built a 2650 kit from Electronics Australia, with DIP switches and LEDs on the front. I remember learning machine code with that, and the aha! moment when I understood registers etc. I still occasionally have to use those skills when debugging C++ code on Windows.
One trick I remember from the Microbee architecture was how the keyboard was scanned from the video chip, with the light pen register in the chip being loaded when a key was pressed. I used that idea in some medical hardware I developed later, for Sonicaid in the UK. They made the "machine that goes beep" (Monty Python).