Some time around 2010, my friend Bruno Florindo made contact with former Timex Computer boss Lout Galie. I provided the questions, Bruno conducted the interview and I wrote up the response for the original incarnation of Byte High, No Limit. Here is the unedited article:
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Earlier this month, Zilog announced that it would be discontinuing the Z80 microprocessor after 48 years of production. Coincidentally, 48 is the number of kilobytes of RAM in the Z80-based ZX Spectrum microcomputer, which by another coincidence was released 42 years ago this month. This numerological rambling probably only makes sense to you if you’re a fan of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (see last week’s article) and read this paragraph in the voice of Peter Jones. If not, don’t panic. To tell the story of Sinclair BASIC, it’s best to tell the story of some of the minds behind it. A human from the planet Earth was one of them. His name is John Grant.
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In my last article, I wrote a lot about the development of the firmware for my hobbyist microcomputer project that became the Chloe 280SE. In this companion article, I’ll cover the hardware. I’m not sure how relevant any of this is going to be to modern development, but I think it’s worth telling the other half of the story. But to tell that story, first I need to tell the story of the time when Timex made computers.
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In this article I’m going to talk about code reuse, reverse engineering and the importance of collaboration. The example I’m going to use is my own hobbyist computer, which evolved into the Chloe 280SE. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to lay it all out in chronological order, starting in the 1960s. This is going to be a long one. You might want to grab a cup of coffee and a box of donuts.
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