If you find it difficult to imagine anything good coming out of the decade that gave us shag carpeting, lime green furniture, disco music, and copious body hair, then you are forgetting about personal computing. The machines of the time were odd and archaic by today’s standards, but the 1970s did give birth to now classic machines like the Apple I and Commodore PET. There was a lot more to see than just CB radios and pet rocks!
The circuit board design (📷: Alexandra Bastet Stehr)
Hardware hacker Alexandra Bastet Stehr is not old enough to have experienced the 1970s firsthand, but is obsessed with the computers of the era all the same. But 50-plus years on, and with many of these machines having limited production runs back in the day, they can be hard to come by. A jive turkey might lay down and give up, but Stehr was groovy enough to do something about this problem.
Emulation alone isn’t enough to scratch that retro itch, so Stehr designed and built a far-out machine to run the emulators on. Not only is this just a cooler way to compute, but it also provides for power management, interfacing with external devices, and SD card storage. And as you might expect, there are some blinkenlights and clicky buttons thrown in for good measure.
Groovy! (📷: Alexandra Bastet Stehr)
How does this groovy mystery machine work? Glad you asked. It is powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico development board, which gives it some good options for emulation. Tools such as Pico_1140 and Z80-MBC2, for instance, allow the board to emulate machines like the DEC PDP11/40, Apple 1, and generic Z80 architectures. But don’t expect a fancy GUI. This is the 70s, man! Instead, you will find a nice text-based interface included in the project.
The project is still in the early stages of development, but Stehr is planning to ultimately release the source code and design files in the near future. Kits may also be available soon if you want to save yourself some time.