PODCAST · technology
4-bits, 8-bits, and a dollar!
by Gary Moore
True stories about technologies I've used over the past fifty years. From 4-bit, Intel 4004 microprocessors to the marvel of op-amps to building an interface to an HP-3000 in a rat-infested animal feed company.
Episodes
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I once designed a computer monitoring product in the closet of my bedroom.
The product was called Callback/3000, kind of like that satirical tv show, "Mystery Science Theater 3000." MST3K premiered on November 24, 1988. My product premiered in the early 1980s! The "3000" in my product's name stood for HP-3000, the minicomputer manufactured and marketed during those years.
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Today my talk is about when trouble won the business!
When I was the Product Manager for a software company, we received an invitation to demonstrate our product to a client. We had a new version of our flagship product. To say it was "wobbly" would be an understatement. The first part of our presentation was the typical PowerPoint. Our client asked…
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When asked to build a tension control for chill-rolls on Harris web presses, I took a radical approach
When I owned an R&D and manufacturing company, I was asked to build a tension control for chill-rolls on Harris web presses. My radical approach was to use optical encoders instead of tension sensors. It worked like a dream!
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Replacing a motor that was too hot to touch!
Today I talk about the time I was called on to work on a machine that was too hot to touch. The moment I opened the door to the factory, I immediately thought of Dante's Vestibule of hell, the one with the gate that bears an inscription "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
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High Tech in a Hot Bus
My first experience with debilitating heat was when I was given a project to install a wireless language lab in school buses. This was an experiment. A school board wanted to try to create a way for kids that had very long commutes to school to officially fulfill one class. Instead of high school...
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Today's podcast is about the first guitar pedal I built.
If you've ever watched a rock concert, you may have noticed the lead guitar player using several foot-actuated devices to change the sound of their guitar. And, if you are old enough to have bought the Beatles' Rubber Soul album, you may have noticed in the liner notes that Paul played "fuzz…
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Programmable Logic Controller project
So, today, I want to tell you about a PLC project I did for a large industrial factory during the mid-1980s. The purpose of the project was to replace a set of mechanical relays and discreet analog devices with a programmable process that would control solid-state relays and replace a bunch of...
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My PowerBuilder project in Pineville, Louisiana
During the 1990s, I had built a large enough network of people that I could contract myself out for short-term programming jobs. One of the jobs was a six-month contract to help finish a call center for an electric company in Pineville, Louisiana. The application we developed for the customer...
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My Adventure with PROLOG
In the early 1980s, I led a fun project paid for by the state of Indiana. The intent was to create a synergy between academia and private-sector technology companies. These kinds of partnerships are very common today, but in the 1980s it was very bleeding-edge. The goal of the project was to…
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Today I'm tell my story about being bitten by snake_case.
Every programming language has a set of standards prescribing how variable names, function names, class names, and so forth should be structured. For variable names, COBOL uses hyphens (-) and Pascal uses PascalCase. Some languages use camelCase and some use snake_case. Today I'm tell my story...
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How to make a product back in the early 1980s
Today, I am walking you through what it took me to make an industrial product in the early 1980s. This is what I did for one of the most uncomplicated products I ever sold. It was an RS-232 to RS-422 converter. It just used a couple of integrated circuits, a few passive components (clamping…
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My Time as a Manufacturing Engineer
I was a manufacturing Engineer for Zenith and worked with the System 3 television when it was first released. The System 3 was the first product Zenith designed without an isolation transformer. This seemed to terrify Underwriters Laboratories® (UL®).
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My first actual assembly language program
The R&D lab that I worked for purchased a couple of Rockwell AIM-65 single board computers. The AIM-65 used the 6502 microprocessor, and it had a built-in keyboard and 20 character printer. The printers were super helpful when debugging programs. The 6502 microprocessor powered the Commodore PET,...
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Learning to Build Products
Titanium dioxide is used to make plastic film brilliant white. For the R&D lab that for, I designed and built a device to measure the concentration of titanium dioxide in plastic film. Coming up with the idea, designing it and building it helped me realize that I really enjoyed building devices....
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My Explosion
Who doesn't like a good explosion? That's why the Die Hard movie series has been so successful. Well, my story doesn't match John McCain's, but it was plenty of excitement for me.
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Yes, I made 8-tapes, but I also worked where they pressed LPs and 45s.
If you've ever seen or heard a cassette tape or an 8-track tape or bought a blank cassette tape, then there's a high probability that I worked on the machine that made it. Early on in my career, I was an electronics technician, and for five years I worked for Columbia Broadcasting Systems (CBS)…
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This is perhaps, the stupidest thing I've ever done, professionally.
In my previous podcast I spoke about the time I measured the voltage on a corona bar, a real one, not the beer. For this same company, I was challenged to design a safety device. I did, but it was the catalyst that nearly got me fired!
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Measuring 80 kV at 15-25 kHz with a crowd of on-lookers
Today's story is about when I worked in an R&D lab for a plastics company. I needed to take some measurements across a corona bar. The corona was 80 kV at frequencies between 15-25 kHz. It was fun, but my on-lookers made me a bit nervous.
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My first project in Italy
I flew from Chicago to Milan and was then driven to San Martina Del Rio, a small town with a population of about 8,000. I was there to install a computer-based machine control system I'd built. Wow, was I in for a surprise with I walked into the printing plant!
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Making an audio amplifier from a 7400-series TTL open collector logic gate
In this episode, I'm talking about when I was a full-time instructor in advanced industrial electronics for Indiana Vocational Technical College (IVY Tech). For one of my labs, I challenged my students to build an analog amplifier from a 7405 TTL logic chip. It was a blast!
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Trunk-net: How we built computers before the Internet
In the beginning of the computer revolution, information about semiconductors (microprocessors, A/D converters, RAM, DRAM, EPROM, etc.) was only available in books that the semiconductor manufacturers printed. The semiconductor representatives were the lifeblood of our revolution!
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Cromemco, S-100 Bus industrial computer
I just skimmed the Wikipedia entry for the Cromemco [a]. Apparently, the Cromemco computer was known for its reliability. That was not my personal experience. However, I was wrong about the bus voltages. The S-100 bus [b] had bulk unregulated +8 Volt DC and ±16 Volt DC. It was an oven mounted…
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Writing a multitasking framework for an 8085 microprocessor.
I built several projects using the Intel 8085, and I built one product. The product was very successful and it never experienced an race conditions or deadlocks. It was highly stable because I used a dead simple approach. That's what I'm talking about in this podcast. I hope you find it interesting.
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The fun of writing comments in code.
Back in the 1970s and early 1980s programmers (i.e. developers, software engineers, etc.) had fun writing code. Working on PCs and SBCs, we were in a new world. We had to create this innovative technology, and there weren't any standards for writing comments, so we had fun with them.
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Building my first P-N junction semiconductor
Is it wrong for an unsupervised 10-year-old kid to make a solar cell using asbestos, phosphorous, and a 2,600-degree furnace? Well, it turned out fine for me, but I never let any of my kids even come close to doing this.
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Working with Lightning
I tell a story about creating a device that interfaced a minicomputer to a machine that created three million volts to simulate a lightning strike.
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My experience with an Intel 4004, 4-bit, microprocessor
To reminisce means to indulge in an enjoyable recollection of past events. Since I actually grew up in technology, I've decided to share some of my memories. For me, I've had a wonderful time. I began learning electronics and computer programming when I was ten years old. My dad was a professor…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
True stories about technologies I've used over the past fifty years. From 4-bit, Intel 4004 microprocessors to the marvel of op-amps to building an interface to an HP-3000 in a rat-infested animal feed company.
HOSTED BY
Gary Moore
CATEGORIES
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4-bits, 8-bits, and a dollar! currently has 27 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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True stories about technologies I've used over the past fifty years. From 4-bit, Intel 4004 microprocessors to the marvel of op-amps to building an interface to an HP-3000 in a rat-infested animal feed company.
How often does 4-bits, 8-bits, and a dollar! release new episodes?
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4-bits, 8-bits, and a dollar! is created and hosted by Gary Moore.
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