Bob Adamson's Home Page
Hi
and welcome, on this fine
, to my home page. These pages are permanently under construction in spare moments
so if you find a broken link or a goof just ignore it - I'll get round to it
eventually, maybe. I'm now retired from my last position with the
Institute for System
Level Integration as a staff member involved in a range of electronic design
work. My
background is in integrated circuit design covering a longish period since the
late 1960s when MOS IC design, at least in the UK, was in its infancy and I have
designed many ICs and managed IC design departments in
several companies before working here.
My main indoor hobby is (personal) computing which
has been an interest since I first made the acquaintance of an
Elliott 803 in the late 1960s. This was a
discrete-transistor / ferrite core machine using serial logic with a cycle time
of about half a millisecond and weighing about half a ton although to its credit it did have a
hardware floating-point unit! Whilst a primitive
Algol (note - about 3.3Mb!) compiler was
available for those with a memory extension, optimally programs were hand-coded to fit in
our available 4k of
memory (this is about one millionth of what is commonly found in today's PCs) and I became quite expert at reading and splicing paper-tape which was
its standard I/O. At university and work I spent my working and many spare hours
coding amongst numerous others an ICL 4130 (from the pre-merger Elliott 4100
series), Ferranti Atlas, various DEC PDP-8s (for years my
favourite - I can still remember the RIM loader sequence and the various
op-codes!) and PDP-11s, Data General Nova, DECsystem-10, CDC Star and of course various VAXs
- Vaxen
seems to have become the popular (though rather unpleasant) plural amongst enthusiasts.
Eventually around 1980 I built my first home computer - a Compukit
UK-101 single-board kit which had only 4k of
RAM, later expanded to 8k and a BASIC interpreter, and was described in a series
of magazine articles by Dr A.A.Berk in
Practical Electronics from
August 1979. This was quickly followed by a
self-designed PDP-8 lookalike using the Intersil chip range and able to run DEC's
amazing FOCAL interpreter, and then in 1983 by Acorn's BBC 'B' (see
here for an advertisement from 1982 or
here for a press review), made affordable by
Marconi's staff purchase scheme. Since then I have owned a succession of
home-brewed PCs of various sorts up to my present home network of PCs, Sparcs
and 'nix boxes. I've also more recently acquired a few 40-odd-year-old DEC PDP-8
machines which I'm in the process of restoring.
Other interests include amateur (ham) radio - I hold a full
licence, callsign MM0TIE - and gardening, where I enjoy growing large
chrysanthemums; and through the better months I can usually be found pottering
somewhere in the garden with my wife, Isabel.
I now live in
Rosyth,
Fife with my
wife Isabel; more or less a full circle as I was born not so far from there in
Leslie, although in the intervening period I've lived and worked in various
parts of the UK and abroad. I first attended school in Leslie, then on to secondary school
at Buckhaven High School before starting work in Glenrothes with Elliott Automation as a
founder-member (though only as a technician) of the first purpose-built MOS fabrication facility in the UK.
After this was closed as part of Lord Weinstock's contribution to the
advancement of UK technology I moved to work for Hughes Aircraft Company (now
Raytheon) in Glenrothes, then part of the Howard Hughes' empire, which sponsored
me (thank you Doris Brodie and George Coull!) to Napier College (now a university in
its own right) and Heriot-Watt University.
(See my c.v. here).
Page last updated by
on 28/08/2012
