Good old days...

M0RVB

So I now have a Creed 444 teleprinter. I've been after a teleprinter for about 2 years now. When I was still at school I used to buy, strip, repair and sell Creed 7E's - maybe 7 or 8 passed through my hands and on to others for pocket money. Back then I had two 7Es for myself, as well as a tape reader, tape punch and a valved TU hanging off a B40 / B41 setup. Weight was not an issue in my basement workshop... But I've never had one of the more modern units like the 444 (yes, modern is a relative term here!)

Having manhandled the beast from the car to the workshop I now need to learn how it is put together so I can be sure it's not going to fly into bits when I power it up. However, hopefully I'll get it running and then get an interface set up. I doubt it will be allowed in the shack (aka the little bedroom) so it may well have to run in the workshop - but that does give the excuse to acquire a nice old comms receiver to go with...

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M0RVB

Goodbye Mr. Chip...

"Zilog has called time on the Z80 CPU." (https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/opinion_z80/) Wow. Actually I had no idea (through never having checked) that it was still being produced. And a fine chip it was too. I never built a system from wires up using the Z80 though. My first system, designed, built from chips and wire-wrap was an 8080 system, hand programmed to control al x-ray diffractometer. This was decades ago now but I still remember it, although I have no photos unfortunately. The system had a timer chip for a 1-second count and was interface to a Nuclear Engineering (I think it was!) counter that used nixies. But I did at least use Z80s, just they came as boards. The first was a Transom Triton computer and by then I was programming in Turbo pascal - back then this was really neat as one could have procedures full of assembler code which made interfacing easy. Later I used Gemini boards and that also gave the ability to have a graphics card. By then my interfacing to the diffractometer included a stepper motor and shaft encoder to control the arc motor. In the end there were two sets of Gemini Z80 boards, one…

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