On Jan 08, at 01:38 PM, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>
> Ah yes. By the time I was ready to throw my PET away the hardware
> inside was so hacked up I don't think anybody but me could boot the
> thing.
>
> [SNIP]
>
> -Matt
I've never been much of a hardware hacker, but my buddy, some eight
years older than I (with an EE degree), hacked up his PET pretty good.
I don't know the particulars, but I remember a wrapped core of wires
some inch-think that went all over his house. He had managed to get
the little thing to control his garage-door opener, his microwave oven,
his stereo system, and I don't remember all what else. You could access
it remotely, too.
The stereo thang was SO cool. He'd cataloged all his 8'' quad tape
reels - which he'd set up with some sort of markers on the "unused"
channels - so you could walk up to the PET, select a song from a menu,
it'd tell you what reel to mount, and it'd find that song and play it!
FF, RW, skip, repeat, all the bells and whistles. Select radio freqs
on the tuner, too! I remember all sorts of solenoids and servos he
added to the guts of his stereo equipment to pull this off.
I was like, 16 or 17, as I recall, and that just blew me away. He goes
back to wire-wrapping instructions on CDC test equipment, and now is
focused on bleeding-edge HDD controllers. He's the "mad scientist guy"
in my life.
My "heyday" was back when MS-DOS was still fair game, and DESQview was
the cool thing to run on a PC. I hacked their and the BIOS interrupts a
lot, and was actually paid pretty well for it. Can't do that no more,
though.
OK, enough of this Wayback Machine(tm) stuff. See Ya,
Dave
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