Taking Apart the Past: Reverse Engineering Vintage Computers

[@LanceHall]

Good grief the first 25 minutes were torture.

[@radman999]

Was better once Zorro took a back seat

[@keyvanmehrbakhsh4069]

isn't there a way to follow through electron traces with naked eyes .I always thought if sit there and get focused enough you might be able to do .:D

[@AlexElectronics]

That's exactly what I did with the XLerator! I just followed the traces around visually and marked them with red ink on an image of the board each time I followed one to completion. For more info, just start watching at timestamp 30:58. It definitely takes time, but it works!

[@TimRiker]

Did the person who made the originals have any of the GAL programming information? If so, did they provide it? If not, are they planning to use what you reverse engineered?

[@AlexElectronics]

Yep, the original designer still has all that stuff, but he has never shared it with anyone as far as I know and doesn't want to disclose it at this time (although he says he plans to at some point in the future). He's not planning on directly using what I reverse-engineered for anything, but he's willing to let me sell people pre-programmed reverse-engineered GALs if I charge them a royalty that goes to him for each set of chips that's sold. We haven't worked out the exact details yet, but hopefully I'll get around to that soon. I hope this answers your question!

[@TimRiker]

At what point does copyright ownership expire? Won't that permit freely disseminating the information discovered in reverse engineering?

[@AlexElectronics]

I believe copyright goes for 70 years after the original designer's death, but don't quote me on that. The designer has also said that he plans on eventually releasing the original source equations at some point in the future, so my reverse-engineering work will probably end up being useless whenever that ends up happening, but at least it's nice to have in the interim. Even if I can't make it completely open-source, at least people will have the option to buy preprogrammed GALs from me at cost instead of the design being completely inaccessible like it's been up to this point!

[@johnsmith1953x]

For works after 1976, it is the life of owner + 70 years. Yeah, its very long. It may be shorter for coporation made stuff.

[@UXXV]

Mul Tim etir? Multi meter ?

[@AlexElectronics]

I always say multi-meter since it’s a meter that can measure multiple things, but I just looked it up and apparently the “proper” pronunciation is mul-tim-eter. So it looks like Will was pronouncing it correctly in his part of the presentation, and I was saying it wrong in my part! But I’ll still probably stick with multi-meter, even if it’s technically wrong, just because I think it better emphasizes the function of the meter as a device that can measure multiple quantities.

[@UXXV]

@@AlexElectronics turns out the British and American pronunciations are different! Another one to add to the solder router and aluminium pile!

[@AlexElectronics]

@@UXXV Interesting!