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Old 14th Apr 2019, 9:49 am   #57
SiriusHardware
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Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Newcastle, Tyne and Wear, UK.
Posts: 11,482
Default Re: MK14 programming interface - MK2

Great find, Tim. As a matter of interest 'Practical Electronics' also often included little snippets and bits of code for the MK14 - have a look through issues of PE for 1978 through to about 1980-81 on the same website.

The only 'sad' thing about reading those is that there is no longer the width and breadth of people interested in hobby electronics to support a 'population' of good magazines like ETI. But that's another whole subject.

I liked the ETI article especially for the helpful information about the keypad connector layout and external keypad matrix as it relates to the actual physical connections - I have never seen that info presented in print anywhere else.

It's amusing that they found the keypad so bad that they felt the need to include the remedy in the review. Unfortunately that certainly did mirror the experience of all of us with those early-issue machines. It's also interesting that the revised monitor was already being discussed / planned at that very early stage. I had not used the 'old' monitor for 40 years until recently, when I programmed an EPROM with it and grafted it into the MK14 to test the uploader's compatibility with it when set to work with that version. It was seriously clunky, much more laborious to use than I had remembered.

Another point of interest in that ETI issue comes not from the review itself but from the early version of the MK14 advert just a few pages into the issue. The illustrations of the machine and the manual were obviously both drawn by someone who had never seen either in their final form, unless the issue I really did look like that, with around half of the ICs vertically oriented. The manual is drawn with a flat spine, which was never the case as far as I know. Later versions of the same advert represented the machine much more accurately and were actually quite attractive, with the drawings of the MK14 (and in a later version, its peripherals) drawn in a fine 'woodcut' or 'engraving' style.

This also reinforces what I've found elsewhere - that the MK14 seems to have appeared in 1978, contradicting what I had believed for years, that it was launched a year earlier. In my old video for the original microprocessor based version of the uploader, one of the captions reads 'A 1977 vintage MK14 microcomputer'. Unfortunately it's a bit late to change that now.
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