I've been contemplating this article for a while now, ever since I discovered that a friend was being forced to abandon this enjoyable hobby. Maybe I just haven't wanted to sit down and write it which forces me to admit that we're at the end of an era. Maybe I'm just saddened that I know of no one else that shares our crazy little obsession with a specific old computer. Or maybe that we're just getting older and am afraid that something that has had such a profound affect on my life will be relegated to a footnote in history that no one will ever read, understand the significance of or care about....

Anyone who has any interest in digital group history knows the name Bryan Blackburn (if not check out his web-site Bryan's Old Computers). Bryan is a great source of information about the digital group, the premier restorer of old electronics, happy to share his knowledge, someone I have come to respect greatly and just a damn nice guy. His web-site is the definitive source of information for everything digital group and was my go-to for finding information when I decided to restore an old digital group system. Although I've always had great intentions about building this web-site, I've always been comforted that another (better) source of information was available, so no big hurry.

To put this in perspective, Bryan's skills are so great that when he took the time to show them off, he is a prize winner. Check out Bryan's Vintage Computer Festival Pics. It takes dedication to restore this old equipment, not to mention the time and energy to transport fragile equipment across the country, knowing that you'll probably have to fix something when you get there just so that others can get a little glimpse of the past.

I "met" Bryan through an email about 8 or 9 years ago after finding his web-site. I don't even remember the content of the original email, but I do remember that he responded almost immediately with lots of details, suggestions and enthusiasm. I've always been more of a software guy, while Bryan a hardware guy. I needed lots of help which he was always happy to provide, usually along with some witty comment or humorous remark. Over the years we've corresponded mostly about details of digital group stuff but it became obvious that we both share some strange enthusiasm for the old brown boxes and respect for the inventor. Back in 2004, we both were in contact with Dr. Suding about acquiring his remaining personal equipment. Bryan got the Mini Bytemaster and I the Bytemaster with 8" diskette sub-system. He got the original design drawings, I ended up with the big box of old chips. We both had the great honor of spending time with Dr. Suding and sharing stories afterward. Not something that many would appreciate, but we certainly did.

Over the years we've shared stories of acquiring old systems, the horrors of receiving systems filled with filth and sand (no kidding) or so discolored by cigarette smoke that the keyboard letters were beyond yellow heading toward brown requiring steel wool to return to some semblance of clean. I remember one particular story where Bryan was excited about a fairly complete system where the shipper packed the circuit boards in styrofoam peanuts! The horror! (For those of you to whom this means nothing, old electronics were very susceptible to damage from static electricity and styrofoam is a great medium for creating and holding a static charge, especially styrofoam peanuts...) As I recall nothing worked and he was only able to salvage the cases.

Unlike most hobbies, there are very few participants that restore and use these old computers, with the number rapidly diminishing. Like any hobby there are lots of starts and stops, great intentions but this hobby takes an enormous amount of time and effort to end up with something that few people appreciate (especially wives....) so when you find someone that shares your passion you feel an immediate kinship, sometimes you find a friend. I think the allure has something to do with capturing our youth, remembering a day when life was less complicated, the future was bright partially because we were at the leading edge of the micro computer revolution, partially because geek (as in computer geek) was beginning to be cool. Well okay, maybe not cool....

In typical good-guy fashion, Bryan has left his web-site up and will try and leave it up for years to come, so I guess the pressure is on to get this site up to par just in case.

So a huge public "THANK YOU" to Mr. Bryan Blackburn. Without your help, I'd probably have a box full of old computer junk instead of several restored, working systems. You're a great source of inspiration and the hobby will certainly be a little less bright without your participation.

With the new additions to my hardware collection came a few unexpected surprises, newer "Bridge" newsletters than I thought existed! I thought Volume 5 number 1 was the last one, but I now have 5-2, 5-7 and 5-8. Unfortunately 5-3 through 5-6 are not part of the stash, so if anyone out there can provide any of those I'd really appreciate it.

I began corresponding with Richard Brandle in August of 2007. He was kind enough to provide me with images of several "Bridge" newsletters to complete the known list of volumes/issues. Thanks again Richard.

Richard built a complete system in 1975 and lots of extras, here is a clip from his original email:

"I built a very complete digital group system in 1975, added to it until the company went under and used it until 1988. My system had almost everything DG made (except the display and keyboard, I made my own) plus several custom components (real time clock module and 20meg hard disk) all in DG cases. I ran the audio, PHIMON, DSKMON and Oasis OS's but exclusively ran Oasis once I got it.

I still have all the hardware and software and have just started a project to move all the software onto a PC which I'll run via a z/80 emulator. I also have all the original documentation and many of the DG flyers. When I get all the paper organized, I'll scan it in and send you the PDF's for your web site. The biggest problem with the software media is having the hardware to read it on. After all this time in storage, I seriously doubt the hardware is working. Do you have any of the software already in some PC file format? If not, it's one of my "to-dos" to get it converted."

Unfortunately for Richard all of my software was on tape or DG 8" floppy disks. I began a project to move to an emulator, but emulating hardware, specifically the phi-deck drives took more time and effort than I anticipated, so the project was sidelined until I have more time. As I mentioned in an early post, moving the software to more modern media is an important project, a thought also shared by Richard: "The biggest hurdle I have is conversion of the old media to something that can be used on a modern PC."

I'm afraid I wasn't much help at all as Richard rapidly progressed from building a rig to read the old ROMs to building a phi-deck device emulator, cassette emulator, printer emulator, interface to old diskette controller so he could read his old diskettes to having OASIS up and running on his emulator in just a few months! Wow! Below is a screen shot of his working emulator running OASIS!



The first email arrived in August with images of the emulator running OASIS in December, impressive to say the least! I have not corresponded with Richard since December, but hope to have an update from him soon.

I haven't been active for about eight months due to work and other commitments, but it's time to get back to work.

The first project was to get rid of all of the stupid posts on this site advertising various unsavory stuff. The good and bad of the internet I guess. So unfortunately I've had to turn off visitor entries. I just returned from a trip to Florida to pick up two systems that look to be in pretty good shape, with lots of diskettes. Also looks like the original owner was a dealer of some sort with lots of copies of brochures and yes even a COLOR "Meet the digital group" bytemaster brochure! It also looks like the OS of choice was OPUS, so there is a bit of documentation as well as a set of documentation on SOS (Single user Operating System) which I've never heard of before. More as I begin to unpack...

A special thanks to Richard Brandle for providing the missing Bridge newsletters. Richard is also working on a cool Z80 Emulator to run DG software! More info in future posts!

Sitting busily cataloging diskettes from a recent find of DG related stuff, I was working at the Bytesmaster that I luckily acquired directly from Dr. Suding about three years ago when I heard the unmistakable sound of electronics frying..... I immediately (within a couple of seconds) shutdown the system (pressed the red "Power" button) but not before the "magic blue smoke" (I had an instructor at MIT who claimed that the reason that all electronic components worked was that "magic blue smoke" was captured inside each component during manufacturing and that the component would work as advertised unless you caused the blue smoke to leak out thus ruining the component.....) appeared at the back of the 8" diskette drive cabinet.

I took the cabinet apart, disconnected from the CPU cabinet and used the nose test to locate the area leaking blue smoke. Not surprisingly, the power supply. After further disassembly I located the tantalum capacitor that was indeed cooked (deflated from loss of magic blue smoke). While I'd read about many problems with DG power supplies and modification to make them less prone to fry other things should they have trouble, I've never had a power supply go bad, which got me to thinking and reading from the old newsletters. Several references were found to ruining diskette drive electronics from power supply failures, not good. I repaired and tested the power supply, put everything back together and all was well, at least with the computer......

I began thinking about the possibility of destroying one (or more) diskettes due to a bad power supply, or a CPU board, or, or, or. I also recently had a Phi-Deck ruin a couple of tapes that I had put together a couple of years ago due to a Phi-Deck board failure and had a 1702A ROM fail (never seen that before). I've decided that it's time to get serious about preserving all of this technology on more modern media, which sounds great until you try and start at the beginning with ROM images. Yes I know, I can simply write the ROM images to audio tape (which I have done), but have you tried to buy high quality cassette tapes lately? Besides, I want to store everything in files that I can publish on the web-site (other than in MP3) audio files. The easiest way would probably be to write a simple program to read the ROM data and transfer it to a PC (actually I use a MAC most of the time) via serial port. The other part of preservation is being able to restore things like a ROM image. I do not have an EPROM programmer able to write 1702A's (not many of those around since it takes a -48V pulse on each data pin to program!!!! I'm only aware of one commercial programmer that is $1,000+) so I'll also build an EPROM programmer if anyone out there needs any 1702s programmed.....

I'll keep you up to date on progress. I've started with a PIC based ROM reader that will likely become a ROM emulator at some point. Building a programmer is more problematic with the odd power requirements.