Britain’s forgotten first home computer pioneer: John Miller-Kirkpatrick

I'd venture that the 4k limit

was because he didn't spend money on the high nibble latch - the INS8060 could handle 64k but has a somewhat idiosyncratic addressing model.

Great article.

Thank you. Had never heard of this chap. Beautifully written and somewhat touching article. May he rest in peace. He made a contribution, and he was honoured today.

That Natsemi SC/MP development kit formed my introduction to microprocessors. I bought one to play with at home and spent many happy evenings in my teeny workshop under the stairs. At the time I lived in a ground floor flat with a maisonette above. Never had a Bywood product though. Possibly I should have. I skipped the first Nascom, and the 6502 board and moved to a Nascom 2 which ended up with a wire wrap home designed video, floppy disk controller and CP/M. There was a shop in Windsor where I used to buy all my bits but I can no longer remember its name.

I imported the CP/M complete with raw BIOS manual from a firm called Lifeboat Associates in the US. And the first floppy disk drive cost £125 I recall.

Ah, the old days, these kids don't know they're born!!! After the CP/M machine I imported one of the first IBMPC compatible bare boards. But by the time I'd assembled all the bits and put it together, ready made boards were available and much cheaper. Things were moving fast...

I thought I had never heard of the man or his work till I saw the advert for the Scrumpi 1 and Scrumpi 2 and I remember seeing it in electronics mags as a child. I may even still have a late 70s magazine with that advert in it. Not something I would have remembered without the distinctive style.

Thanks for the great article.

Electronics Today International.

That cover shot is of the 2nd ETI I ever bought (err... for the Electronics In Model Railways article, not for the cover picture, I'm sure!) - I was 13 at the time and bored with Everyday Electronics. I tried Practical Electronics too, but preferred ETI - it was more computery, which I was more interested in while PE seemed more audio-y back they.

Sinclair shipped first the ZX81 and then the Spectrum

Let me fix that

Sinclair shipped first the ZX80 then the ZX81 followed by the Spectrum

What the world needs now ...

We need a Scrumpi simulator written in PyPy to run on the Raspberry Pi. Yes, that's right, a ScrumpiPyPyPi.

I worked on that copy of ETI and Computing today - just saying.

Telly Tax

Of course, connecting an inexpensive computer to a TV set used as a monitor was easier here in Canada or in the U.S., because in Britain, keeping an extra TV around the house means paying an extra annual license fee.

RE: Telly Tax

No it doesn't, never did.

Bought one... Still got it...

I bought a Scrumpi kit. £60 for a kit was a very large sum at the time.

Power supply not included. You had to program in binery since both data and address buses were shown by LEDs and data set by switches. I wore out the right hand “Step” switch.

It eventually ended up in college in a Differential Pulse Polarography rig.

It had a very expensive 12 bit A/D converter and an 8 bit D/A (output to a chart recorder).

I interfaced a bought-in board so that I could record/read data from a cassette recorder. I sent off to have a 32x8 PROM programmed which was used to boot from. I expanded the memory with SRAM on a bit of veroboard. I think to 1.5k.

The whole lot was self-funded from my grant (remember those!) as none of my lecturers knew WTF I was on about.

Still got the whole thing somewhere. Must find it and see if it still works…

That name

There was a "John Savard" on Usenet back in the day, regarded by all who read him as the Wrongest Man on the Internet. I wonder if this is the same one?

Still on the shelf behind me.

Still got a Scrumpi on the nostalgia shelf behind me in the shack - next to the Sinclair Scientific calculator.

Contact bounce on the switches was a nightmare - but at least it wasn't too bad learning the SC/MP instruction set by heart. I recall nearly passing out when told the price of a 2708 eprom for the thing though.

You read stories like this and

you just wonder where the UK went wrong between then and now

US/UK Exchange rate

There are companies who simply change the $ sign for a £ sign and call that the UK price; most are more reasonable.”

Not a lot has changed there then in the past 40years.

Sometimes it is almost worth flying over the pond and buying the kit in the US especially in places that don't charge sales tax and bringing it back with you.

I missed those days

I got my first computer on Christmas day 1984 (a VZ200 - an Australian rip off of the TRS-80) so I missed those really early days. Nowadays I work in the embedded industry and it is really like it is still in the 1970s! There is not much available in terms of operating systems and it is all about banging the hardware registers directly and every thing is interrupts, interrupt and more interrupts! It is amazing just how little things have changed in 30+ years. The hardware is much more capable but the concepts are all the same.

But I have always felt that I missed out because in those "old days" you could be a single engineer and make a whole product yourself. These days projects are huge and you will only ever be a member of a team working on something and thus have only limited impact on the design and implementation of the product. I always enjoy reading about people like John Miller-Kirkpatrick (not to mention other trailblazers like Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry) and feel a little bit jealous of what they did!