A visually accurate replica of the MCM/70 computer, an all in one system with a keyboard, dual cassette drives and a small one line display

MCM/70 Replica Embodies Proud Canadian Heritage

February 4, 2023 by Chris Wilkinson 17 Comments

When a vintage computer is all but unobtanium, software emulation is often all that remains. Unless you are [Michael Gardi], who saw an opportunity to reproduce Canada’s home-grown MCM/70 microcomputer using a combination of software emulation and modern hardware.

Short of building a brand new MCM/70 from the original schematics, this faithful facsimile of the MCM/70 does everything it can to pay homage to the original machine. The foundations of this project can be attributed to the York University Computer Museum (YUCoM) MCM/70E emulator, highly regarded for its “historical accuracy”. The MCM/70 used dual cassette tapes for storage and a funky 32-character dot matrix plasma display, which is all reproduced in software (other versions dropped one of the cassette drives for a modem, bleeding edge innovation for 1974 microcomputing).

From here, [Michael] set off to assemble the various physical components of the original computer. The chassis itself was built from scratch using a mixture of 3D printing and traditional woodwork. The high-voltage plasma display was recreated using four HCMS-2972 dot matrix modules, which minor compromises. The original computer used display memory as extra storage when executing instructions, which created a sporadic blinkenlights effect on the original display. This new display unfortunately won’t reproduce this ‘thinking’ pattern, but it’s a small sacrifice.

Similarly, the original keyboard was going to be challenging to replicate with 100% accuracy, so a brand-new recreation of an Ohio Scientific computer keyboard was used instead. The layouts are extremely similar, and anyone except your most committed Canadian retro computing enthusiasts probably wouldn’t notice the difference. Being a modern recreation of a vintage keyboard, this was relatively easy to source. A set of custom-made keycaps with APL legends really helped sell the replica.

And while working dual cassette drives would have brought this project home, it’s commendable that [Michael] has created ‘working’ cassette drives using 3D printed cassettes and some magnetic magic using hall effect sensors to identify the loaded cassette. The emulator incorporates three virtual cassette tapes which made this solution possible.

If this all sounds familiar, it might be because this project was based on a superb Hackaday writeup of the MCM/70. A truly innovative computer for its time, the story behind Micro Computer Machines (not to be confused with the toy cars) is a fascinating tale, and the write-up is worth a read if you haven’t seen it already.

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Inputs Of Interest: Canadian MCM/70 Was Kinda Like The First Cyberdeck

February 23, 2022 by Kristina Panos 30 Comments

Not to start a debate in the comments or anything, but what would you say was the first microcomputer, or personal computer? We suppose the answer depends on your definition. Some would argue that the PC was born at Xerox PARC with a curious portrait-mode display and a three-button mouse, while others would say it all began in a garage in either Los Altos, California or Albuquerque, New Mexico.

If you take the term ‘computer’ to mean that which can crunch big numbers fairly quickly, then the Canadian-made MCM/70 is arguably the first personal computer in that it is portable, has an alphanumeric keyboard, a display, and supports cassette storage, which could be used to extend the 8K of memory. It was an all-in-one computing solution, and it could have an optional telephone modem built in. This was a forward-thinking machine for 1974.

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The IBM 5100, image from December 1975 issue of BYTE.

Bringing APL To The Masses: The History Of The IBM 5100

December 19, 2023 by Maya Posch 42 Comments

The 1970s was a somewhat awkward phase for the computer industry — as hulking, room-sized mainframes became ever smaller and the concept of home and portable computers more capable than a basic calculator began to gain traction. Amidst all of this, two interpreted programming languages saw themselves being used the most: BASIC and APL, with the latter being IBM’s programming language of choice for its mainframes. The advantages of being able to run APL on a single-user, portable system, eventually led to the IBM 5100. Its story is succinctly summarized by [Bradford Morgan White] in a recent article.

Although probably not well-known to the average computer use, APL (A Programming Language) is a multi-dimensional array-based language that uses a range of special graphic symbols that are often imprinted on the keyboard for ease of entry.

It excels at concisely describing complex functions, such as the example provided on the APL Wikipedia entry for picking 6 pseudo-random, non-repeating integers between 1 and 40 and sorting them in ascending order:

x[⍋x←6?40]

Part of what made it possible to bring the power of APL processing to a portable system like the IBM 5100 was the IBM PALM processor, which implemented an emulator in microcode to allow e.g. running System/360 APL code on a 5100, as well as BASIC.

Despite [Bradford]’s claim that the 5100 was not a commercial success, it’s important to remember the target market. With a price tag of tens of thousands of (inflation-adjusted 2023) dollars, it bridged the gap between a multi-user mainframe with APL and far less capable single-user systems that generally only managed BASIC. This is reflected in that the Commodore SuperPET supported APL, and the 5100 was followed by the 5110 and 5120 systems, and that today you can download GNU APL which implements the ISO/IEC 13751:2001 (APL2) standard.

We’ve previously looked at the Canadian-made MCM/70, another portable APL machine that embodied the cyberdeck aesthetic before William Gibson even gave it a name.

Top image: The IBM 5100, image from December 1975 issue of BYTE.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip.

A Love Letter To The Sphere Computer

March 11, 2023 by Al Williams 21 Comments

[Ben Z] loves the Sphere computer, a very early entry in the personal computer boom of the mid 1970s. The 6800 CPU was unique in its day that it was a full system — at least in theory. If you could afford the whole system, you got a nice case with a keyboard and a memory-mapped display board. You can see a great video tour of the system below the break.

The Sphere suffered from a few problems, none of which were easily foreseeable by its designer. First, the 6800 didn’t get the traction that the 8080-derived CPUs did. Second, the S-100 bus would prove to be popular but that nearly always meant an 8080-type processor in practice. Third, while an all-in-one system was the right idea, it was pricey at the time, and many people would opt for something less expensive even if it had less capability. People also wanted to leverage hardware they may have already had. It was easier to imagine hooking up a surplus TeleType, for example, to a more conventional computer than to a Sphere that expected its own display hardware and keyboard.

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Hackaday Podcast 205: Hackaday Berlin, So Many Sundials, And Ovens Pinging Google

February 10, 2023 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start this week’s episode off with the announcement of Hackaday Berlin on March 25th. It’s been quite some time since we’ve been on the other side of the pond, because we had to cancel 2020’s Hackaday Belgrade due to COVID-19, so excitement is high for all three days of this “one-day” event.

After a new What’s that Sound, discussion moves on to an impressive collection of DIY sundials, the impact filament color has on the strength of 3D printed parts, the incredible retrocomputer replicas of Michael Gardi, and the Arduino FPGA that you’ve probably never heard of. We’ll wrap things up with the unexpected difficulties of mixing multiple cheap audio sources in Linux, and try to figure out why our kitchen appliances need to be connected to the Internet.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download all the bits!

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A widescreen slate-style cyberdeck with a small keyboard sits in front of a cassette deck stereo. Headphones sit to the left of the deck and an old Casio calculator watch is to the right.

2022 Cyberdeck Contest: QAZ Personal Terminal

October 22, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 9 Comments

The slabtop form factor has had a resurgence in the cyberdeck community, and [Greg Leo] has designed the QAZ Personal Terminal to be about as small as a slabtop could be while still having full-sized keys.

Since the device is using a 35% QAZ keyboard as its primary input device, [Leo] has helpfully given a quick overview of how text is input in the video below. Coupled with that surprisingly popular 4:1 LCD screen we’ve seen elsewhere, this cyberdeck looks like a modern interpretation of a TRS-80 Model 100. The Banana Pi powering the QAZ Personal Terminal is running Debian with spectrwm, a tiling window manager making arranging windows a breeze with either a mouse or keyboard. The integrated mouse layer on the keyboard means you don’t need a separate mouse at all if you don’t want to spoil the 1980s mobile chic.

[Leo] has another video all about doing calculus on this cyberdeck with the math shortcuts integrated into the keyboard. Fractions, exponents, and common Greek letters are demonstrated. We can see this being a really great note-taking device for engineering and math courses if you wanted something more portable than a laptop.

It’s hard to get very far hacking without a little math. For more math-focused input devices, check out the Mathboard or the MCM/70.

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Custom Macro Pad Helps Deliver Winning Formulas

October 5, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 18 Comments

For those of us with science and engineering backgrounds, opening the character map or memorizing the Unicode shortcuts for various symbols is a tedious but familiar part of writing reports or presentations. [Magne Lauritzen] thought there had to be a better way and developed the Mathboard.

With more than 80 “of the most commonly used mathematical operators” and the entire Greek alphabet, the Mathboard could prove very useful to a wide number of disciplines. Hardware-wise, the Mathboard is a 4×4 macro pad, but the special sauce is in the key set implementation firmware. While the most straightforward approach would be to pick 16 or 32 symbols for the board, [Magne] felt that didn’t do the wide range of Unicode symbols justice. By implementing a system of columns and layers, he was able to get 6+ symbols per key, giving a much greater breadth of symbols than just 16 keys and a shift layer. The symbols with a dot next to them unlock variants of that symbol by double or triple-tapping the key. For instance, a lower or capital case of a Greek letter.

The Mathboard currently works in Microsoft Office’s equation editor and as a plain-text Unicode board. [Magne] is currently working on LaTeX support and hopes to add Open Office support in the future. This device was an honorable mention in our Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest. If you’d like to see another interesting math-themed board, check out the one on the MCM/70 from 1974.