Back in the
'80's my mother (yes, my
good ol' mummy) built a computer using the
Motorola 6809 processor. The
circuit diagrams she
photocopied from some
techo friends of hers, also
ham radio jockeys and
technophiles. The parts she purchased from
Radio Shack and
auctions. She was
particularly skilled at pretending to be a
ditzy female when it came to buying these parts, to the point of telling the Radio Shack
staff that she
liked particular
components because "they
looked pretty" or "she
didn’t have one of them and thought she might
find a use for it one day". In this way she received
huge discounts and walked away with
vital components at next to nothing. At auctions she would buy
boxes of junk because there were one or two bits that she
needed in them. The rest of the bits she would
sell to the others that were
bidding for the same items, and more often than not
make a profit.
By the mid-80's we were the only house in the area with a computer. It was built into the cabinet of one of the first televisions to come into the country. It had a 13" black and white screen, and the back of it folded out and hung on bits of green twine to allow the boards to stay cool.
It had a 360Kb 5.25" floppy drive, and ran a version of BASIC (after the 15-20 minute boot-up off the boot floppy ). I taught myself BASIC programming, but could go no further with this machine - it had got me into computing and I went from there.
My mother, having started down the path of computers later bought computers of varying shapes and sizes, and still owns them to this day - a veritable museum of computer history:
...all thanks to
Motorola and their
6809 chip, and my
mum's brilliance!