C3PO and R2D2

 By John Feagans

The first almost production PET boards had arrived and been brought up. Bill Seiler and I chose to celebrate by taking an afternoon break on May 25, 1977 by watching the Star Wars debut at the Winchester Cinema in San Jose. Inspired by the movie, Bill changed some labels in the IEE-488 software handshake to include assembly language labels R2D2 and C3PO.

The tech was making a bill of materials hence all the tags on the sockets. Look at the size of those bypass caps from HalTed! 

The first boards with the real memory map required a lot of cut and paste to fix glitches in the layout.  Don Webster, our tech, and I did surplus store hopping to find enough bypass caps and pull-up resistors to populate three boards. First stop was HalTek in Mountain View where we scored on some of what we required, mostly heat sinks and voltage regulators, next stop was HalTed.

From a Homebrew Computer club newsletter with a guide to local surplus stores.

The owner was Hal Elzig, and his partner's name was Ted. Hence the store name HalTed. Years later they established a store just up Central Expressway from the Scott Blvd Commodore location and I frequented them for other projects. After the Commodore factory in Santa Clara closed I found remnants of projects I had worked on!

We ordered some parts from Godbout near Oakland Airport and JameCo in San Carlos. We ordered ePROMS and processors, PIAs and RAM from Norristown. Everything had to be socketed too. Next Don and I went to the local electronics dealer on the El Camino and bought 3 Zenith TVs and 3 cassette recorders to strip down and repurpose as the PET display and storage units.


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