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Comment by systems_glitch | Hacker News Reader

I keep wanting to do a project in FORTH and even have started a couple, but always end up punting and going to something else (usually assembly, they're vintage computer projects). I do have a Rockwell R65F11 FORTH microcontroller-on-a-chip I'm working on turning into a clock that I've tried to promise myself not to just do in 6502 ASM :P

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> R65F11

Back when those came out I used a dozen of them on a serial network to run a custom robot. As part of that project I designed a floppy disk controller, paged memory expansion boards, motor control and encoder interface boards, control panel interface and more.

In case the context isn’t clear to some, no Internet, no Arduino…you couldn’t buy a bunch of little boards to solve problems. The entire project consisted of a couple dozen wire-wrapped STD-44 boards. Like these:

https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1801376.pdf

I also wrote my own file manager and code editor.

All in Forth.

I came across the R65F11 I have from Burgess Macneal, who was using FORTH in the early 1980s to build a digitally controlled audio mastering equalizer. For various reasons it never became a commercial product, but he'd saved all of his prototyping material.

Burgess had been using FORTH on his Ohio Scientific, so I suppose the transition to another 6502-core was probably pretty easy!

This is what I've wired up so far:

https://imgur.com/a/QCBOHq1

I went looking and found an old storage device (binder) with long-term storage technology elements (sheets of paper) for my old R65F11 designs. Not the entire thing, but a couple hundred pages of H-CAD (hand drawn pencil schematics), printed code listings and manuals. Here's the main processor board:

https://i.imgur.com/a0fvjqa.jpg

Here are the front pages of three data sheets I have:

https://i.imgur.com/fPgRzc7.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/EeFNT8j.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/kmRsyXq.jpg

In the documentation set I have a full printed listing for some version of the code editor I wrote as well as a pile of utilities and drivers. This is dating back almost exactly 40 years.

Also have the schematics for various interface boards, including a floppy disk interface board and, I believe, the driver I wrote to run screen-based code storage and retrieval from it. This was a very long time ago. I can't remember how closely these schematics and code matched working hardware.

If any of this could help you I might be able to scan and post somewhere. It will take some work because I have to use a flat-bed scanner. It's amazing how well paper and vellum survive four decades inside a binder.

Thanks for the uploads! I will check today but I believe I've got hardcopy of the datasheets/appnotes you have -- Burgess also grouped design docs into binders, so I have his originals. It's a habit I started carrying over to my own projects a number of years ago, never have to worry about something being deleted by accident, a format becoming hard to read (switched EAGLE CAD -> KiCAD 9 years ago), etc. Plus, I find it easier to read dead tree reference material when working with something on the bench!

We did a R6501Q based SBC a number of years ago, and eventually got RSC FORTH kernel and development ROMs running on it. We'd found a copy of the ROM object code in Burgess's archives and got it going from that. I want to eventually add a floppy controller to it, a friend had been working on replacing some of the floppy-based screen storage with CompactFlash backed storage, but got busy on other things.

What was the intended purpose for your R65F11 hacking?

Confirmed, I have all of the datasheets/appnotes you posted first page pictures of!

Oh boy does this resonate! Kind of like chopsticks. Practice and practice but always revert to knife and fork.

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