Welcome to the Retro Computers and Electronics Blog

Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog. This blog is a place where I will share my experiences repairing and restoring retro computers and electronic equipment. 

Retro?

What do I mean by retro computers? The word retro means different things to different people. For someone born in this millennium, an original iPhone may be retro. For me, retro means computers that were available when I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s. I was born in Britain during the era of the 8-bit computer, the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and the BBC Micro. 

The early days of home computing were a battle of competing companies all trying to make their computer the one that would become an industry standard. Companies like Acorn, Atari, Commodore, Dragon, IBM, and Sinclair all released a range of computers aimed at the home market, and for a long time, there was no clear winner. 

IBM and the compatible clones running on Intel x86 processors would eventually dominate the market and become the industry standard, but during the early 80s, there were several processor manufacturers competing for market dominance and dozens, not hundreds, of computer companies designing products using different processor designs. 

You had the likes of Commodore and Atari using the 6502 processor, Amstrad and Sinclair using the Z80, and IBM using the Intel 8080. Each processor architecture had its advantages and disadvantages, and every company would design their computer to take advantage of their selected processor’s features and try to find ways to work around the flaws in that processor’s design.

My History

My own experience with computers started with the Sinclair ZX81. When I was born, my parents bought my brother a computer to keep him occupied. My parents were not rich, so they bought the only computer they could afford, which was the ZX81 at £69.95, or the equivalent of £293.37 today. I would play with the ZX81, but as a toddler, my limits were playing basic games. By the time I was old enough to understand what computers were, we had upgraded to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48. Many hours were wasted playing Horace Goes Skiing, Magic Carpet, and Booty. 

It wasn’t until we upgraded to a ZX Spectrum +2 that I began learning how to program computers in Basic. The programs were simple, but it showed me that I could make computers do things that I wanted to do, not just play games written by other people.

In 1992, we upgraded to an Amiga 1200. This was a major step up from the days of the 8-bit ZX Spectrums. Gone was the command prompt and ZX Basic, and instead was Workbench, a colourful graphical user interface that you could control with a mouse. The Amiga was the point at which my interest in computers became an obsession. I would spend hours on the Amiga playing games, programming, drawing pictures with Deluxe Paint, and generally trying to figure out how everything worked. 

It was around this time that I also started to develop an interest in electronics. Since I was a young child, I had always had an interest in how everything worked. I would take things apart to see what was inside, and sometimes I would put them back together. My father was a plumber, and he would regularly bring home various gadgets from work for me to disassemble. Things like mechanical boiler time clocks and water pumps. 

I would also scrounge old electronics from different places and try to fix them or strip them down for their components. It wasn’t long before I had amassed a good collection of resistors, capacitors, and drawers full of random electronic bits and pieces. This collection has continued to grow over the years, and my workshop still includes some of the original components that I salvaged decades ago.

In 1996, I moved from the Commodore Amiga to an IBM-compatible computer. Not by choice but because I had started studying for a diploma in computing, and the college I was attending only used PCs. The college was a bit behind the times in terms of what they taught. At the time, Windows 2000 was the current OS on the market, and Java and C++ were the languages of choice for up-and-coming programmers. The college course involved learning Cobol and Pascal on 10-year-old computers running Windows 3.1. 
After college, I started my own web and graphic design agency, building websites for companies both directly and as a consultant for other web design agencies. When smartphones appeared on the market, I moved into programming apps for iOS and Android.

Raspberry Pi

During this time, I kept an interest in electronics, building various gadgets for use around the home. In 2012, the Raspberry Pi computer was released onto the market, and I used one to build a smart home system. A part of the design included a monitoring system for my solar panels. I needed a way of measuring the voltage and current from the solar panels so I could record how much power they generated each day. To accomplish this, I designed an analogue-to-digital converter board that would plug onto the Raspberry Pi. The new smart home system worked well, and I wrote an article about it on my brother’s blog, www.briandorey.com.

The article was picked up by several tech websites, including Hackaday, and we started getting emails asking us to make a commercial version of the analogue-to-digital converter board for the Raspberry Pi. I came up with a design that would be easy to use, and we built 100 boards to sell on our new website called AB Electronics UK. The boards sold faster than expected, and pretty soon we were selling a range of different development boards for the Raspberry Pi to people all around the world. 

Today

Today, 12 years later, we are still building development boards for the Raspberry Pi, and I still regularly design various electronic devices for my own personal use, many of which are published on my brother’s blog. At the end of 2024, I started taking more interest in the old computers of my youth and decided to start this blog detailing my attempts to repair and restore old computers as well as designing new hardware accessories for them.

The articles on this blog will be a mixture of repair guides, reverse engineering old computer hardware to see how it worked, and articles on new devices I have designed.

I am also planning on writing a series of articles on designing a new 8-bit computer based on technology that was available in the 1980s and 90s. Plans for this are still in their early stages, but it will be a modular design, most likely based on the 6502 processor. The articles will go through all of the stages in designing a computer from defining the basic architecture, to drawing schematics, laying out printed circuit boards, assembling the hardware, and designing software to run on the new computer. All of the hardware and software will be open source and available on my GitHub repository.

I hope you will join me along this journey.