[ Part 1 ] [ Part 2 ] [ Part 3 ] [ Home ]

VIPER

With the commercial offerings as well as the Popular Electronics introduction to 1802-based computing, the formation of users groups was inevitable. One newsletter, VIPER, supported RCA VIP users and was published from June 1978 to June 1980 by Terry Laudereau of Aresco.

Each issue of VIPER was about 32 pages long and contained software and programming information, such as ready-to-run games in CHIP-8. RCA sponsored VIPER indirectly through advertising, and by June of 1979 there were 542 subscribers.

Terry began to go blind during VIPER's second year of publication, and the newsletter ceased after completion of the second volume.

The Association of Computer-Chip Experimenters

The Association of Computer Experimenters (ACE), later known as the Association of Computer-Chip Experimenters, formed in the late seventies in Ontario. The group's bimonthly newsletter, Ipso Facto, ran up to several dozen pages in length and soon attracted an international following. Issues were packed with hardware hacks and software for various 1802-based computers. [More ACE history...]

Software was typically published as a hexadecimal dump, often hand-typed, since relatively few members were working with the luxury of an assembler or printer. Occasionally there would be an article with software in Tiny Basic or CHIP-8, but the lion's share of software through about 1980 was hand-written in 1802 machine language. ACE then started selling cassettes loaded with an implementation of the Forth language as published by the Forth Interest Group.

figForth

Like Tiny Basic, figForth was small enough to be practical on computers with limited resources. It also featured an outer interpreter, which allowed users to work interactively with their computers. Unlike Tiny Basic, though, figForth compiled (or tokenized) subroutines into a form of threaded code. This code was then processed by a very lean inner interpreter, yielding an execution speed far greater than that provided by Tiny Basic. Judging by the numerous Forth articles that began to appear in the pages of Ipso Facto, figForth was a hit with 1802 computer enthusiasts.

The diversity of systems was an occasional source of frustration for members. Articles dealing with CHIP-8 were of little interest to members who didn't own RCA's interpreter, for example. While this complicated the club's publication of software, it made the creation of expansion hardware seem impossible: the VIP and ELF II expansion buses were incompatible, and people who'd built an ELF from the Popular Electronics article didn't have an expansion bus at all. 

The ACE Bus

Eventually, ACE developed their own bus for 1802-based computers, and designed boards to adapt different systems to the ACE bus. The hardware to do this was rather simple since, in general, the different buses all had the same signals available. This facilitated some rather clever design. The adapter for the ELF II, for instance, required that an 86-pin connector be soldered on the bottom of the ELF II's circuit board. The ACE bus adapter plugged into the bottom of the ELF II, raising it up at an angle and making it a sort of front panel to an ACE bus card cage.

Armed with a common bus, ACE began to design, publish and sell their own circuit boards. Boards were bare and came with schematics, a parts list and a parts placement diagram. ACE created a 64K dynamic RAM card, a floppy disk controller, a video card based on the Motorola 6847, and eventually their own CPU card. The CPU card's flexible design allowed it to function as either a standalone single-board computer or as a controller in an ACE bus system.

Dusk

By around 1983, issues of Ipso Facto became noticeably leaner as member contributions dwindled. New technology lured members away, and ads for 1802-based microcomputers disappeared from the back pages of electronics magazines.

The day of the 1802-based microcomputer had passed.

Nonetheless, 1802s all over the world remained hard at work. Swiss payphone manufacturer Sodeco-Saia used the 1802 for phones in France, Austria and many African and third world countries, where its low power allowed the unit to work entirely from the power of the phone line.

Indeed, the 1802 found a home in many low-power embedded systems --- and not just on earth.

Inside the Galileo space probe and other satellites, pulse tiny 1802 wafers, forever securing this microprocessor a place in history.

[ << Prev ] [ Home ]