danjuliodesigns llc

This project came about for three reasons. I had resurrected an old hall-effect keyboard, a friend at my local hackerspace had given me several tubes of an old intelligent LED display and others there who were part of the retro-computing scene reminded me of the joy that personal computers gave in the early days. I decide to combine the keyboard and intelligent displays into a terminal that would be used with a retro-mainframe I also wanted to build. I remembered that the IBM 5100 "Portable Computer" had a switch on it that allowed selection between BASIC and APL programming languages and I decided my terminal would also support a paddle switch selecting between fundamental operating modes. I never built the retro-mainframe but the terminal was completed. Instead of an external computer I added a Tiny Basic interpreter ported from a version written by Mike Field and Scott Lawrence.

Currently it supports Tiny Basic in one mode and a set of VT102ish terminal-related stand-alone programs in the other. It can emulate a VT102 terminal as well as run stand-alone versions of Eliza and the BSD Banner program.

In addition to the computer itself, I gave the hall-effect keyboard and an original parallel-port HP Thinkjet serial interfaces.

This page mostly provides links to the various repositories and descriptions of this project that exist elsewhere on the web, as well as a few photos.