Marketing Survey

[Julian Skidmore]

Hi folks,

Just a quick little post: in a few words, what were the most important reasons you decided to buy a FIGnition?

-cheers from Julz

--
                             
                  The DIY 8-bit computer from nichemachines™

[Si Brindley]

- Inexpensive and interesting project.

- To recapture my youth (ZX Spectrum nostalgia).

- To understand how an 8-bit micro can work (it was a bit beyond me, as a kid).

- For the satisfaction of putting it together myself.

- To learn a new (to me) programming language.

- To show off.

- To support your efforts (having watched some videos and read some of your posts).

- Because I'm a geek!

 

 

 

Julian Skidmore wrote:

To: FIGnition <fign...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Marketing Survey

From: Julian Skidmore <theorigi...@gmail.com>

Reply-To: fign...@googlegroups.com <fign...@googlegroups.com>

Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:25:57 +0100

 

 

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[Gregory Carlson]

Small simple machine with Forth to play with

Greg

[carl]

Hi Julz

I saw the FIGnition on a BBC tech-Know programme on their Web site. And thought WANT!

Regards 

[Romilly Cocking]

A fun FORTH machine, and a chance to learn about ATMega-based FORTH implementation techniques.

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[Andrew Stephen]

On 24 Jul 2014 02:25, "Julian Skidmore" <theorigi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi folks,

Just a quick little post: in a few words, what were the most important reasons you decided to buy a FIGnition?

 

I ran Arctic ZX-Forth on my ZX81 back in the 80s and read about the Jupiter Ace with great interest but never had the chance to own one. I liked Forth and had some vague plan with some friends to order the ZX81 ROM version but we never did. Later in life, as a Unix SA, I discovered that OpenBoot on Sun servers was a Forth (pForth?) implemerntation and had a bit of fun STOPping servers to show my colleagues how to program it :)

 

Because of this history with Forth I took notice when the BBC coverage featured on Hack-a-Day back in 2011 http://hackaday.com/2011/04/29/bbc-covers-an-old-school-hacker/

 

Last year I was looking for a project to do with my eldest son - 14 at the time -  and David Greelish mentioned he was selling some excess stock after VCFSE 1.0. This turned out to be cheaper than ordering direct due to the vagaries of exchange rates and shipping costs so I got it :)

 

 

-- Andrew

[carl]

Sorry,

I did not include the link to the very video that got me hooked. ;-)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13201254

[Kenneth Whewell-Clarke]

Hi,

I am interested in how software works at hardware level.

I have owned pretty much every mainstream machine since early 80's .. Spectrum, Electron, BBC, Dragon 32, Atari ST, Amiga1000 to 500+, Apple Cube, Win95 to XP, Every variation of Linux and BSD ... since days when you had to compile everything yourself.

So the Fignition gets me back to understanding how computers actually work as a combination of hardware and software.

Just upgraded to 1.1 .... Great stuff.

Ken

[dpowy...@yahoo.com]

Hi Julz,

Reasons for me getting a Fignition were:

- Nostalgia of using an 8bit computer as per my childhood

- Never soldered anything before and wanted to give it a go

- To better understand how computers actually work (you don't get that with PCs)

- A bit of fun

I've not used it as much as I would want, but keep meaning to do so, especially since you can now load via audio - I'm astounded that you've got a machine with so few components to be able to do that, incredible!

Dom

[Neil Macmillan]

Reasons for getting a FIGnition:-

- I miss my old Jupiter ACE. I upgraded it with a massive 48K RAM, proper keyboard, digital I/O ports, sound generator and a phonetic speech synthesiser. I also dabbled with ETI magazine's colour video board but never got it 100% perfect due to CMOS ground-bounce. FIGnition gives me the opportunity to replicate this setup. Except that the FIGnition is much much faster than the Jupiter ACE.

- FORTH is still my favourite programming language and the ACE's version of it is one of the best implementations with its edit and redefine words.

- FIGnition is a "bare metal" system where the whole hardware/software environment is exposed to the user, unlike other small uP systems which sit on top of Linux and a rather complex RISC. 

- It was cold during the winter and I needed a hot soldering iron to keep me warm ;O)

Alternative strategies might have been:-

- Find another Jupiter Ace on ebay

- Wire-wrap an Ace using schematics and old ROM code

- Verilog Z80 + memories + FPGA

- Jupiter ACE emulator on Linux/PI

FIGnition saves a whole bunch of hassle. Thanks!

[Bob Stone]

I first encountered Forth on a Spectrum (Artic), was my first exposure to a compiled language and to reverse polish notation, I remembered the Jupiter Ace from the magazines of those days but never had or saw one in the flesh.  Now I like developing for microcontrollers and SBCs like the Arduino / mbed / Raspberry Pi / Beaglebones etc and the things that appealed to me about the FIGnition were the quirkiness in conjunction with the nostalgia and the chance to revisit a language that had seemed interesting and a change from the norm.  Plus it was a soldering project of 'just right' size, non-trivial but not a chore.

[gfh]

FORTH !