NABU Unboxing and Setup
When DJ came back to Calgary he brought a surprise with him. It's a new-in-box NABU from the 80s just for me! I'm a lucky man! love
I am going to unbox it, set it up, and start running it. It's gonna to be fun! Cross your fingers that it still works after being in a box for 40 years
And let's hope there aren't any cockroaches inside
If you're not familiar with NABU computers, it's a really cool story, here's the description from https://nabu.ca/
(Natural Access to Bi-directional Utilities)
A personal home computer was released to consumers in 1982 to connect families and businesses on a worldwide network. Founded in Ottawa, Canada, in 1982, families and schools used cable TV modems to connect NABU PCs to a country-wide network. In addition to standard PC capabilities, the NABU computer could download software and information content through the cable feed. Applications included games, programming languages, and news.
It'll be exciting to now be an official part of the NABU community! There have been so many cool things going on with the NABU recently, check out DJ's playlist to get the whole story: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNT_tjSHIQ3lGJR_zOqh9gGeHzykR0spq
NABU computers run in DJ's blood!
Join the live chat and add your comments, ideas, and suggestions!
Actually this one looks good: https://a.co/d/e6qqwO8
Ok thanks DJ I ordered one although there was a B&W tv on Kijiji for $20 but I was not sure where I would put it.
I picked up 2 of these wheeled carts from princess auto on the weekend. I have one in my upstairs office and the other in my basement lab. I moved the CRT tv to the basement because I don't film down there as often. But it's great because I can wheel it around and get it out of the way - throw it in the closet lol
The RF to HDMI adapter turned up. Worked well with zx81 (timex 1000) but I just get a scrambled screen with zx80. My zx80 is from Australia (I grew up there) so I am wondering if something else is going on. I’ll keep playing.
Holy cow, you even have the basic manual! Hard copy
Very excellent. The manuals and paper brochures are one of the most exciting things for me with retro computing. I try to get as much as I can for my collection because it makes a good read. Interestingly, when you think about that old stuff, you still learn things that can be applied today. For example, the stuff I've done on the NABU has gotten me back into my Assembly roots - writing on the metal to the CPU. So that got me thinking about how compilers work - so I've been rewriting portions of ARC for significant performance improvements. Also, we're starting on a new ARC project that I can't talk about, which is scheduled to be completed before the end of 2023.
Do you think the difference with the Australian zx80 is PAL?
Yeah I have all the manuals and also all the magazines, articles I cut out, code snippets (entire syntax collection over 5 years) and even a zx81 kit that I never assembled.
Assembly I dreamed of having an assembler. All I could do was peek and poke a bunch of hex code into memory to do anything in 1K. I got to know that little z80 chip (same one in the NABU) quite well.
The RF box I purchased supports PAL NTSC SECAM etc but it looks like the modern day RF converters are looking for a bunch of signals the ZX80 just doesn’t provide including back porch and colour burst as the old black and white TVs didn’t look for it but the new TVs do. All the zx80! Provide was sync tip because that’s all the old TVs needed or looked for. So the new TVs and my RF converter won’t work. There is a hack for it but I don’t want to mod my zx80. It appears to be working fine as you can see key presses flash the screen.
Excited to hear about ARC progress and code optimization. Is there a fully browser based version on the horizon :-).
Haha - something like that
. We're exploring 2 options - and prioritizing the option that runs on the most hardware with the least amount of resource requirements so projects can focus on robot skills.
This is a video from 1981 I watched when I was a kid that first peaked my interest in Robotics.