a good deal of digital archeology is essential. Certainly not for the contemporary witness, but I remind you, those were pre-internet times. Now, 6809 and operating systems, that is a thing. My idea is not to just get A computer running, but to stay as close as possible to the initial motorola family concept, to build the computer that Motorola DIDN'T build. But that's not exactly what I had imagined, I wanted to go a little bit bigger, to be able to run a real operating system on it. Hacking up a basic 6809 is indeed no big deal at all, after I had scribbled the first design of a very basic BASIC computer, I realised that it was already rather common, I read a lot of pages referencing to Grant Searle's design. After a few weeks with almost daily packets via ebay (unbelieveable, those Chinese), I had a generous stock of chips for experimenting with different designs.įinding the appropriate design, the one which I thought would be the best for my idea, was, well, a real adventure. I sticked myself to an internet terminal for a total of some 30 or more hours of research for details, example projects, data sheets, schematics, literature, hardware components, software possibilities and so on and so forth. I can solder, and I played around a lot with Arduinos and such in the last years, so I felt fit enough to give it a go. Of course I professionally got into the PC world right away, but meanwhile, well, PCs. I am no professional in the matter, not at all, but a computer enthusiast since first contact with the Commodore PET series (the bigger ones) at school. Should be easy and cheap, a few chips, some ROM and RAM - and here you are. But then I thought, well, maybe I'll start a little more humble, with an 6809 system. I grew up with Atari ST and Commodore Amiga and such the 68K was my first choice.

Being frustrated from work and missing a challenge with an not too far away goal, I finally decided to tackle an idea I'm hatching since decades, namely to just go and build my own computer.

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