Hi from an an old member of BAEC

[Peter]

Hello,

I was an active member of BAEC right through the 1970s, so it was a
real delight to see a notice in Elector advertising the new archive
website. And when I looked at the archive there was my name - right at
the top of the first article! So I thought I'd better get in touch.

When I first joined the club had made one or two joint projects,
including a large noughts and crosses machine that was used in
exhibitions. Because of my interest in computers I was asked to
coordinate the club's attempt to build a computer (the term PC hadn't
been coined at that time but that is what it was going to be). We had
managed to get our hands on some ferrite core memory and we were going
to base the machine around that - most of the early corespondence was
about drives for toggling and clearing the individual cores. Today's
gigabyte DIMMs would have been the size of a large room if that
technology had not been superceded!

The project dried up - technology was moving faster than we could keep
up and it was soon cheaper to buy a kit to build a personal computer
than to make one from scratch (Newbear Electronics was the UK favourite
- still got mine up in the loft). Then the Apple came along and we gave
up. But we all learned a tremendous amount, which was the main point.

An important name that I haven't yet seen in the archive is that of
Cyril Bogod. Cyril was the founder of BAEC and its honorary life
president for a couple of decades - a sad day when he died. He was the
central dynamo of the BAEC - his enthusiasm kept it going. A very
special guy in British amateur electronics.

Best wishes,

Peter Hinchcliffe

[ally smith]

Hi Peter

 

Good to hear from you.

 

You cenrtainly were at the cutting edge of technology in the 70's. True that technology did move on somewhat but how reolutionary and visionary was the Club then. Pity all we have is a very well maintained site - nice to have more people involved and who knows maybe restart the Club.

 

It is important that guys like yourself provide us new guys who take for granted modern technology the information on developments away back in the 70's - helps us appreciate what we are doing.

 

Please keep in touch.

 

Best Wishes

 

 

Ally

Peter <Prune...@ntlworld.com> wrote:

---

To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre.

[Prune]

Thanks, Ally, I'll certainly hang around this group for a while and answer questions if I can.

Peter

[Ray Williamson]

Hallo Peter,

Good to hear from you.

One thing I did invent is an adaptor to use 3.5 inch disk drives to replace
3 inch drives in Amstrad and other 8 - bit computers.
It provides the full range of signals.
Must write it up for BAEC sometime.
All the best, Ray.

[Prune]

Hi Ray,

That sounds like a fun project - it would be good
if you could write it up (but let's be honest -
when do we ever write when we could be
soldering?).

I built a controller for a 5.25" disc drive for my
NewBear rig (5.25" floppies were the standard back
then). That wasn't the hard part - there were no
PICs back then but I was able to scrounge a
dedicated IC that did most of the work. The
hardest part was writing the software for it - in
hexadecimal machine code - no compilers available!
That kept me out of trouble for a while.

Peter

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[David Ledgard]

I am very busy at the moment so don't have time to maintain the site
properly. I have heard the name 'Cyril Bogod' but was not quite sure how he
was involved in the club only joining in 1990. I will add something about
him in the members section if you would like to draft a message about him
i.e. when he founded the club, how long he was secretary, what projects he
was involved in...

Another idea would be to have an annual meeting like they used to. Where
members can demonstrate their build projects. I believe they did this in
Wales for a time?????

regards,

David Ledgard