6 ms·
I don’t know if people are upvoting this page because of the cool retro look of his home page, but I’ll mention that he’s well known for his TTL Cookbook and CM
by computator 6y ago
I don’t know if people are upvoting this page because of the cool retro look of his home page, but I’ll mention that he’s well known for his TTL Cookbook and CMOS Cookbook. Everybody who was into digital electronics in the early 1980s had them. More than once visitors to my place took the “cookbooks” from my shelf expecting to see some delicious recipes and were sorely disappointed.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoAlso notable for his library of hand-coded PostScript used to manually generate his newsletters.
- Turing_Machine 6y agoYeah, he was also doing print-on-demand books using a fleet of dedicated Apple II machines sending PostScript to Apple LaserWriters. This was a Big Deal because the standard setup at the time was a Mac connected to a LaserWriter, but it occurred to him that you didn't really need to tie up a Mac if all you were doing was sending the same PostScript file to the printer over and over again.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoAnd the amazing cheap video cookbook! Given that it uses the 6502 as a glorified state machine it is a good model for building FPGA based CRT controllers.
- koalahedron 6y agoI had that book too, I just recognized it when I looked it up. I don't remember it as well, but apparently it was the display circuitry only.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoI still have it on my bookcase, and I was not remembering correctly, it has only TTL type logic devices! So now I need to figure out which was the 6502 book. Found it: https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/socv1.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/socv1.pdf "Son of Cheap Video" :-)
- koalahedron 6y agoThanks! I noticed "PAiA" electronics sold kits of these--I remember that name from back then. Did they sell parts or other kits? Looks like they are still in business. Also noticed "Scungy Video" :) (Do NOT search for this term in your favorite search engine.)
- koalahedron 6y ago> delicious recipes Ha ha He also did the TV typewriter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter which allowed people to have something to hook their bare board micro to. I had money to buy his green book, but not the computer or the TV. :)
- sehugg 6y agoWhich used the same technique as the Apple 1 video terminal, though Woz claims not to have known about it when designing it. Probably true, because there weren't many inexpensive options for RAM besides shift registers! https://www.willegal.net/appleii/apple1.htm https://www.willegal.net/appleii/apple1.htm
- djmips 6y agoI wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't come across it and perhaps forgotten about it. Nevertheless simultaneous invention happens all the time.
- koalahedron 6y ago> Nevertheless simultaneous invention happens all the time. Try telling that to Isaac Newton. :) Or better yet Edison or the USPTO.
- djmips 6y agoAnd this technique was also used for video output on the Sinclair ZX-80 if I am not mistaken.
- jecel 6y agoHe later had books mentioned in other comments: "The Cheap Video Cookbook" and "Son of Cheap Video". In these he added just a few TTLs to a Kim-1 computer and generated video using mostly software. The Sinclair ZX-80 was much closer to this than to the TV Typewriter (which was 100% hardware). Some other computers that used this technique back in the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aamber_Pegasus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aamber_Pegasus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_(computer) And here is a recent project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigatron_TTL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigatron_TTL
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoDon't forget the Incredible Secret Money Machine :-) He also corrected my pronunciation of "tinaja" when I called him.
- wrycoder 6y agoI remember one of his books - perhaps the one on Apple assembly language - described an organized way to disassemble executables. It involved first going through the printout using colored pencils and color highlighters in a particular way to develop visible structure. I remember being quite impressed with his methods. The website is an amazing labyrinth. It’s rather like a higher dimension toroid full of dusty wonders from a simpler time. Very much old Arizona.
- ddingus 6y agoI used that method early on after some magazine published it. Was either BYTE or Creative Computing. Was a teen at the time. And it worked! Back then, one could either display to screen, or dump to a printer, or file. The paper was where this method shined. And the beauty of it was having a plan and compartmentalizing the problems. Start with program flow. And on 6502, 6809, which were the chips I was learning on, that was branch, jump, jump to subroutine, and a few other tricks, like pushing addresses on to the stack, then returning from subroutine. RTS. I used colored pencil though. Highlighters were too big of a commit. Otherwise, yeah. Just start finding where program flow changes. Structure just kind of happens! You are going along and insight hits. Early on, it hit over and over too. Small programs printed and in a binder became a sort of library. Examples, snippits, notes, tricks. From there, one just peels back the onion. Loads, stores, program, data, math, compares as math... Was very empowering frankly. Also learned about the power of commenting. Many attempts other peers and I did before checking out Lancaster, boiled down to literal descriptions. LDA sprite, X 'Load A with contents of address, plus X STA (screen), Y. 'Store A to address pointer, plus Y The better way was to talk about what was happening! LDA sprite, X 'get sprite data STA (screen), Y. 'write to display After a time, things like the Apple ROM listing made sense. Soon after that, our programs made sense to one another. The other benefit of these two things combined was coding on paper. Thinking through printed out listings helped when writing programs out. And often, I would start with an ORG statement, some EQU (equates) to define important values and addresses and then just write the comments. If it reads well and each line contains one action, it translates into assembly language pretty well, maybe taking two or a few instructions. No big. Just work the problem a line at a time and before one knows it, a routine is done. On the more fancy computers, we had sprites and sound chips. Writing values in places did a lot. On the Apple 2 computers, there was none of that. But also pretty much everything needed software. People made bits. Blitter, math, sounds, etc... That simple (well, screen memory excepted) system, coupled with how Lancaster tended to think and communicate, proved effective. I left High School in the 80's basically fluent in 6809 and 6502 assembly and machine language and able to write non trivial programs, and or use them in tandem with high level languages to make applications. I am not saying Lancaster's work was responsible. We all had magazines, teachers (who varied in what they could speak to), mentors, books and one another. But, how he approached problems was a definite influence and I would argue a definite multiplier on progress. Good times. Interesting character. Great influence.
- squarefoot 6y ago> he’s well known for his TTL Cookbook and CMOS Cookbook. Those two books were my best purchases back in the day, they helped immensely to grasp the technology. I see they're now free for download at Don's page, and they're still relevant today. I would highly recommend them to all newcomers to electronics.
- ddingus 6y agoSeconded. And I am about to take a trip down memory lane. Good reference!