I have a few 6502 and 6809 based microcomputers, shown and/or described below.
Commodore PET
One day a friend of mine, along with Hannes, decided to bequeath to me a number of machines. One of them was the Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) that had formerly resided in an elementary school. The only peripheral I have for it is its cassette recorder.
This Commodore PET was donated to the Large Scale System Museum in Pennsylvania and is no longer in my posession.
Commodore VIC 20
Although there is no photo here, there is a Commodore VIC 20 in the collection, also based on the MOS 6502 CPU. I was given this machine by my brother, Jim. (This particular VIC 20 may have been one that was acquired from American TV (“Crazy TV Lenny”) when my late father purchased a stereo system, and then given to my nephew Cameron, and eventually found its way to me.)
Commodore 64
The collection also has a Commodore 64, which was also given to me by my late brother, Jim.
Atari 800
Also not shown is my Atari 800. Back in the day, I and a number of friends and colleagues at Wisconsin DOT purchased Atari 800’s from a local computer store known as Magic Lantern Computers. We had a blast with the machines, in particular competing over a game known as Star Raiders.
I was sometimes called on by those friends to repair machines that were acting up – which generally consisted of disassembling the machine, cleaning the contacts, and reassembling the machine. Wishing to show their gratitude, my late friend and colleague Dave Fehr got together with a couple of other folks and got me a GTIA chip to replace the CTIA chip which appreciably enhanced the graphics capability of the machine.
I used this machine to write the one and only computer program I ever sold for profit. Atari had a third-party development outreach program called the Atari Program Exchange. I wrote a version of SpaceWar! One of these days I need to hunt up the source and object code and give them permission to post it on the APX website.
The Atari 800 (and 400) had a simple serial bus to talk to peripherals like printers and disk drives. I used one of my Altair serial boards (which had originally been part of a cassette interface) and wrote an emulator so I could use my larger capacity Micropolis disks and printer attached to my Altair for my Atari.
Radio Shack Color Computer
Before I owned my Atari 800, I owned a Radio Shack Color Computer, which is still in the collection, but not shown. While the 6809 CPU in the Color Computer was a more sophisticated CPU than the 6502, the Color Computer didn’t have anything like the graphics CTIA or GTIA chips. When the Atari 800 came out, I saved up and purchased one, and shelved the Color Computer.
Radio Shack Color Computer 3
My late uncle, a radio amateur (“Ham”), also had a Color Computer as did many other Hams. This Color Computer 3 which belonged to my uncle I later sold on eBay, and thus is no longer in the collection.