The 1616 users and contributors

The 1616 users

The funny thing about the 1616 story was the wide variety of people who were involved.

We had a large number of retired men who had never touched computers before. Most of these became 68000 assembly whizzes.
We had a number of guys from a working-class background. Like Vic Maguire. Vic was a bricklayer who mainly used his 1616 to reverse engineer and "improve" the engine control system on his Ducati.
We had many students. Most seemed to be from UTS and darn near all of them dropped out. Go on, blame me, you klutzes.
A lot of systems went to secondary education institutions - Darwin TAFE, Wollongong University (still there!), Australian National University.
We sent a system to Steve Uhler at Bellcore so he could see MGR with his own eyes.
To my knowledge, males outnumbered females four hundred to zero. My wife Kathy was a bit of a 1616 whizz, but that doesn't count.

Sometime in 1987 we started having "user group" meetings at our Sydney premises. Second Saturday of the month. Once we sold the shop the meetings moved to our house. Nothing's changed, except nobody brings 1616's any more. Everybody brings 77THz Intel boxes running GNU/Linux or they kick my Quake butt using a buggy game loader from a company in Redmond.

Some of the more memorable hackers: (Help me out here, guys)

Kevin Bertram

Developed a Transputer card for the 1616.

Mark Harvey

Wrote the SCSI driver for the Z80 disk controller card. And, in so doing, forever defined and redefined the partition table format, damn him!
Wrote/ported the MSDOS floppy read/write routines.

Jeremy Fitzhardinge

Wrote swarm, which was a sort of screensaver thing. swarm's ooh-ahh factor arose from its implementation language - this thing called C++.
Wrote swget and swset. These manipulated a Dallas Semiconductor smartwatch which sat underneath one of the EPROMs, relieving the user from having to type in the time&date at power-on. Hey, J: my 1616 is fifteen minutes fast and it's only been ten years. Get over here and fix it!
Wrote this cute 3d spinning logo called signon. Nobody understood how it worked.

Matthew Geieieier

Come on, cough up - what did you do?

Cameron Hutchison

What did camh do?

Philip Hutchison

Phil was a hardware guy.

Developed a 68030 daughter card. This worked, but never quite reached prime time.
Did Phil do the Ethernet card???

Eric Lindsay

Eric is on the shortlist for the best human I've ever met. He maintained hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of documentation for the 1616 project and its many applications. Come see us one Saturday, OK?
Eric painstakingly turned my ravings into a large amount of most professional looking documentation. The documentation is preserved here.

Colin McCormack

Ported the cfront C++ compiler (backended by Hitech C)
Wrote getty for the BBS
Ported Minix to the 1616 hardware
Ported Minix to the 1616 hardware!
Ported Minix to the 1616 hardware!!

Andrew McNamara

Gad. Memory fails me

Michael Milway

What did his card do?

Who did SSFORTH?

Greyham Stoney

Complete rewrite of the Z80 card's floppy drivers.

John Taylor and his partner whose name I fail to recall

Developed an entire numerically controlled sheet metal spinning machine controller with a pair of 1616's.

David Taylor

Developed an EPROM programmer card

John Telek

Developed several analogue I/O type cards. What did they all do??

Conal Walsh

Developed SSEG. A massive graphics package in EGA video mode. Several applications and games on top of this. Help! I've lost SSEG. How would I get a screenshot anyway?
The ZRDOS (CP/M80 clone) port. A huge rewrite of the video subsystem for this. New floppy drivers (Did it have a SCSI driver?).
Ported many of his old MicroBee games to ZRDOS.
General support of the ZRDOS system.
A 68000 tracer and debugger.

Graham Redwood

Developed an Ethernet adaptor while working at UTS.

On to The cool 1616 hacks.

AKPM Home

Andrew Morton, 8 March 1999