"In 1977, I was interested in amateur radio and Morse code and wished to
build a keyboard to transmit Morse. Designs I had seen seemed to use a lot
of ICs and I thought that it would be better to use one of these new-
fangled microprocessors which I could program to send Morse and also use
for other things. Most microprocessor board designs seemed to require a
separate terminal with even more ICs. However I remembered seeing a design
in Radio-Electronics which combined the terminal and processor on the one
board and should be cheaper to build. So I copied the three articles from
the April-June issues and read them thoroughly. I did not have enough
money to buy all the parts at once, but I ordered the bare circuit board
in December 1977 and it took me a year and about $500 to obtain all the
parts. Thirty years later I suppose that would be equivalent to about
$5000, which seems a lot of money for a computer with 768 bytes of memory!
At the time, I recall saying to a friend that I had spent the year
building a money sink. Learning to program took a while and hand
assembling with its need for counting relative offsets in hexadecimal led
to me counting other things as...8, 9, A, B, bugger...It took me until May
1979 before I first used the 2650 system to send Morse code, but alas, I
found that using two hands and the large keyboard on the operating desk
were inconveniences which led me to go back to my old keyer. But I found
many other entertainments associated with the computer, building homebrew
dynamic memory, NRZ recorder and floppy disk controller. I later used a
Tandy Color Computer before succumbing to the PC. However I later started
using PIC16C84s as I remembered having so much fun with assembler with the
2650." - Richard Rogers.
