the story of the 1802 HHC as i remember, the ball started rolling one Autumn
in the late '70s - there was a sense of expectancy in the air: the microcomputing revolution was gaining pace software? what software? ...exactly! i sent off for a set of manuals from RCA relating to the 1802 - it seemed to have a lot of dedicated support chips and software, which i didn't think i could afford the magazine article held out the possibility of using standard logic chips with the 1802 to reduce the complexity and the cost - and this rather minimalistic approach appealed to me - i was hooked i sketched out a preliminary design for an 1802 CPU board (used as the page background to this site) which provided a system bus, full DMA control decoding, an open-collector interrupt line for expansion, a programmable timer signal, with interrupt, to enable multi-tasking, keyboard input latch with interrupt, and a display output latch having settled on a hardware target, i returned to the problem of producing the software which would run the thing more synchronicity occurred, this time in the form of an issue of 'Byte' magazine which was dedicated to the Forth language - between that and the Forth Inc information i was able to deduce enough about the internal workings of a threaded-code language to start constructing my own version for several weeks, i spent every lunch-break at work developing a Forth implementation on one of the 8080 development systems i used there it was a very weird feeling writing a computer language which i had never seen in operation and which was based on unconnected scraps of information, never intended as an implementation guide eventually, i had written enough for it to spring into 'life' - but was it really Forth?!? however, it worked - that was enough for me! shortly afterwards, i had the opportunity to rejoin a research group at Brighton Polytechnic who were then in the process of setting up a microcomputer laboratory in the Elec Eng department if it processed bytes, and stayed in one place long enough, i implemented Forth on it within a short period of time, we had Forth available for developing embedded/application software on an Apple II, on Nascom, and DAI microcomputers, and on the venerable Data General Nova 820 many of the students were producing embedded-code hardware systems for their final-year projects and the Forth environment enabled me to provide cross-assemblers, cross-compilers, downloaders, etc, to install and run embedded Forth code on their project boards with all this Forth experience under my belt i felt i could start to concentrate on the hardware for my own microcomputer and i began to refine some of the design ideas i had sketched out previously the one luxury i allowed myself in the design was to buy a TWO line LCD display (for this was 1981, dear reader - LCD displays were new, expensive and my disposable income was heavy on disposable and light on income) i anticipated that i would need a minimum 'window' of two lines to edit code on a system: one line to enter new text and a second line to give some indication of whereabouts i was in the code actually, there were two luxuries: i also bought a 'badge-engineered' portable printer used by the Tandy BASIC hand-held micro - it printed on narrow rolls of paper, about 16 characters wide i managed to decipher the strange double 4-bit serial data scheme it used to transmit characters (using its own non-ASCII code scheme) - the HHC printer driver output Forth source 'blocks' as 4 sequential columns - i was able then to literally 'cut-and-paste' the output back into pages of source code eventually i replaced the original printer with the Tandy 4 colour plotter - this provided scalable fonts, full page-width printouts, hi-res vector graphics ...all from a Cosmac 1802 - what a dream! the 'mass storage' device was cassette tape - i had found an article outlining a scheme called Manchester bi-phase encoding in 'Wireless World' it was a neat arrangement of frequency encoding that gave the maximum data bit/encoding frequency ratio, an inherent synchronising edge at each bit boundary, and it could be recorded/replayed directly to & from an unmodified cassette recorder using the mic & earphone sockets the HHC cassette I/O used Forth 'code' definitions to transfer data at 2400 baud - the only signal conditioning required in hardware was some slight edge filtering on recording, and a Schmitt-trigger circuit to sharpen the signal edges again on playback i added some data 'packaging' around the raw data bytes to enable Forth to read and write 1 Kb Forth 'blocks' of source/binary data with a checksum appended in addition to its use for printing and cassette I/O, the serial connection is also programmed to read & write RS232 data using a single-transistor level changing circuit - Forth 'code' definitions are fast enough to enable reliable serial transfer at 9600 baud using a 2.5MHz crystal for the processor clock i made most of the the case and keyboard out of marine ply and ramin, and the side walls out of a softer solid wood my only regret, when i completed the computer was the rather 'chunky' size and weight of the unit - it is possible to use it as a hand-held device - but only just! the neatest feature for me, apart from having completely customised portable computer hardware and software, is the benefit of having the whole memory as battery-backed: i can add some new definitions, switch the HHC off, and then when i switch it back on later the new code and the source 'blocks' in the screen edit buffers are still there - upgrading or modifying the 'core' is just a matter of unsetting the write-protect switches and downloading the new binary code from the PC using the monitor 'kernel' on the HHC once completed, i started to use it as a tool for Forth-based project development - it doesn't have a huge amount of free memory but it has enough to develop and test ideas for incorporation into larger projects on other Forth machines and to host smaller applications one of my projects was to produce an 1802 simulator in Forth - this takes 1802 binary code and allows either single step display of all register, stack and i/o conditions as the code 'runs' - or it can be run with monitoring off to test larger sections of code up to a break-point the HHC has also been useful as a programmable I/O device eg. to monitor and debug serial I/O data between other devices; as a sequencer for a homebrew 'drum' machine, etc. surprisingly, it's still operational and a few years ago i upgraded the operating system from Forth Inc style to a combination of Forth-79 and FIG Forth |