The Sum of Many Hopes

Very few things in life are as rewarding as engineering can be. That is especially true from a hardware perspective. About three years ago, I bought a double Europe format prototyping board and, essentially, I had a whole world of potential creativity ahead of me. I restricted the field to a project that I had in mind for quite a long time (more than thirty years): put an actual 6809 processor to work.

As often in life, your own personal evolution is guided by role models--people who inspire you to go above and beyond. Many of my former teachers are part of my personal history. Before I began my associate degree in EE I was already engaged in hardware experimentation. In other words, by reading amateur electronics publications, I already knew way more than I was supposed to when I entered the field as a student. That helped quite a bit with the academic curriculum. I remember this particular test in embedded software. I had spent countless hours in the lab developing some software for managing a database of alumni. I did this (on my own time) using a custom Pascal implementation for our target system which was, back then the MC6800. Most of my fellow students never went that far. They stuck to the basic curriculum, which only required hand coded machine language. I do not mean to boast in any way but my personal investment ended up paying off big time. AIM Pascal allows the embedding of low level assembly language code (how better could it get?). After about 30 minutes, my code matched the requirements demanded by the exam. The test duration was two hours. I left a lot a friends sweating back in the field behind me. I remained unashamed to this day.
 
This was back in 1984 though. The world is definitely different these days. Hardware integration has become so professional that only experts (best case) are required to repair a defective device. Yet, a not so experienced EE engineer remains empowered enough to procure the necessary components, assemble and put them to work in the context of a general purpose computing platform to this day. The Z79Forth project is a living proof of this.
 
One might start from a blank page, just as a writer would, and then one might wonder: "where do I go from here?" Power, clocking, essential CPU circuitry, address decoding, serial communications and, eventually,  a working system. That working system is entirely yours. There is not a single part of it (be it hardware of software) that you did not select and put to good use in context.

It does not get any better than that!


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