AKBiocca Engineering

Somewhat Random Reminiscing 

This is a spot to put something about some of the really old fun stuff that we have done. It will be updated from time to time.

 The Software Subscription (TSS) - Subscribe to better Software:

Jim Guggemos WB6WNC (now a Silent Key) and I had a software business partnership some years ago. We were neighbors and both worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and we decided to sell some software for the Heathkit Computers, and later that fledgling startup, the IBM PC. VISED was a text editor similar to unix vi that would run on HDos or CP/M and later MSDos. TProc was a text processor somewhat like roff.

When my son was born I had a few days before wife and son came home, and I wrote a RadioTeletype program. It ran on HDos and later CP/M. It was quite sophisticated for the time, with a multithreaded kernel and intertask queueing. I sold it through TSS and it developed a following.

Jim was working on some game programs written in basic, and he was having trouble cross-referencing them. They were large and the programs took forever to make the reference. One weekend I wrote a  cross referencer (XREF).  (in C) that was 20 times faster than the existing program he had. We put it in our product line and sold them. One potential customer sent us email that it was ‘impossible’ for it to be that fast. I guess he didn’t think we had measured it. It was fast, and used little memory in the times when this was critical.

To build the early software I wanted something better than basic. Jim and I had selected the Heathkit computer and their operating system HDos for our first home computers. Walt Bilofsky of The Software Toolworks had put out a version of small C that had been improved and customized for the Heathkit machine. They had a license arrangement that you could give a copy to your friends and send Walt a reduced fee for these extra copies. We licensed quite a few to our friends in the local Heathkit Users Group that Jim and I led for many years in El Cerrito.

Gary Hubbard was a member of the El Cerrito Heathkit User Group and he wrote an improved assembly language version of the printf module, which was most of the memory use in a small C program. He managed to pack a very complete printf into 1180 bytes as I recall. We could then write a ‘hello world’ program in about 2k instead of 10k.

One of the compilers we used produced assembly language, and then we had to assemble it. The two pass assembler took a great deal longer than the one pass C compiler. So I wrote a one pass assembler that was designed to handle the C compiler’s output. It was designed to be very fast and space efficient. This reduced our compile edit cycle time by something like a factor of 3.

Homebrew Micro Projects

Eric Williams WD6CMU and I decided at one point to build some embedded micro projects. At the time the 8748 was affordable so he built a simulator and I built the assembler based on the assembler I had written years earlier for CP/M. My first project was a darkroom timer. I wrote the code and debugged it on the PC using Eric’s simulator and my assembler. When I finally burned it into a chip and tested it there was only one small bug left - a hardware initialization that the simulator did not emulate.

PIC to AVR

More recently James McDonald, Eric and I have been building embedded micro projects with the AVR from Atmel. I did a project with a PIC first, but changed to the AVR when I discovered that they have more parts with reprogrammable FLASH memory (PIC only has a few, Atmel’s AVRS are ALL reprogrammable), plus the AVR works with GCC which is free and generates some impressive code.