Oh, man, does that bring back memories. When I was a freshly minted embedded real-time software engineer in the mid '80's I was immediately tasked with programming all the GALs and PALs (using PALASM), since that "felt like software" to the old-school EEs (who were still transitioning to PC-based schematic capture). But that work sharpened my digital hardware skills, and got me deeply invested in moving functionality back and forth across the hardware/software divide, to get the most done with the smallest board and the least power consumption. Now we live in a wonderland for embedded design that ranges from discrete jelly-bean logic, to immense FPGAs, to low-power multi-core SoCs that include a shocking number of peripherals and application-programmable GPUs. Whew, what a ride!

This video brings back some memories. Back in 1979 (or was it '78) I designed my own 100 channel data acquisition device. It had a trigger level and if any channel triggered all channels were fed into a commodore Pet computer. I used a 6502 microprocessor and a couple of PIAS. The whole mess was wire wrapped and on several cards in a rack card cage. I was in the last few years of a BSEE degree at the time. I finally graduated in 1980 after taking a final 400 level math course. Anyway, I entered it in the IEEE student paper contest and won third place. Thanks for all your great videos. I have been a code monkey for the last 30 years but miss the lab with scopes and spectrum analysers, etc...

Even as advanced as electronics have reached in scale today, the fundamentals remain valid. When my grandfather past away, his books on electronics were passed on to me and some of them dated back to 1948. In fact, he had a book that gleamed the Wheatstone bridge circuit as the latest Apple product!, but this circuit is still used today and has gone from dollars to pennies to make now.

When Dave is sleeping, his supercap is c­harging, when it is fully charged and dr­iving the base current of the transistor­, he wakes up in the morning......he sta­rts to work.......the lunch is acting l­ike a resistor and he feels like eating is resisting him from wo­rking and he is desperate to go back to the bench.......I mean Dave, you sleep elect­ronics, eat electronics, you work elect­ronics.....love you man! Oh the good old DOS days......everything you say make me nostalgic, really! We learned everything/electronics the hard way.......rather the fun way.......I wonder if I can make one of my son (yes, I'm blessed with two, first one- double the age of Sagan and second one half his age) get into electronics, I try to show him your videos and blogs, how enthusiastic one can be about electronics, how much you can be in love with these things and stuff like that! Electronics is fading away now a days.......anyways....really love your passion and knowledge. Keep going......keep up the porns for us.......

Doesn't anyone notice that Dave looks a little young for someone who designed such a project 20 years ago?

As a vintage computer enthusiast getting old software running can be a pain in the ass.

I've been looking everywhere for a Dave's Head simulator. You not only found the paper copy but the Dave's Head audio to narrate the simulation. Awesome. Last time I saw a Dave's Head simulator work was almost a week ago and the video Dave's Head outputs these days is pretty dang good!

Looking at computer stuff before my era is quite fascinating to me. The fact we went from having to model things like this on paper 20 years ago to simulating everything inside a program inside a true UI is amazing. My father gave me a "Computer Shopper" catalog from September 1991 and looking at it is quite simply fascinating and the fact the stuff we have today is something people 20-25+ years ago could never have imagined working. "You'll never carry around a calculator with you all the time" is a popular line from my elementary school teachers, but we have so much more. I carry around a 5.5" 1080p phone with a 2.5 GHz quad core processor and 3 gigs of ram with 16 GB memory and 4k video camera. That is simply unimaginable just two decades ago.

Turbo Pascal was what I used to learn how to program at Uni back in the late 80s. Loved it. Moved up to C/C++ and off to the races as a professional programmer. Good memories!

It was fun seeing you get so excited, while walking down nostalgia lane. It was very interesting to see your design too. :)

Good to see DaveCad 95 still does the job!

I was born in 1996, that was not nearly 20 years ago. HOLY SHIT I'M ALMOST 20.

Thanks for sharing this project with us, Dave! Really excellent video.

You did this in '95/'96 so... your early 20's?! Crazy. Very impressive.

Lengthy yes, but damn fascinating! Cheers, Dave!

Very nice, and I like that you got carried away and showed as much as you could! (kudos for saving so many files and devices to let it show again!) Question: in your publications of schematics on magazines (be it in the 1996 or nowadays), did you get interesting questions? If yes, could you make a video over those?

Nice project for it's date and definitely deserved to be on front page . More magazine please ,no matter new or old.

Awesome! It's been a long time since I've seen Borland Pascal...

Dave! Show us a picture of you when you were younger. Circa when you were doing this project.

When my father died we was going thru his things and we found old electronic drawings from the 1960's witch he made when he was studying on the university. It was fun to look at since I have studied electronics as well.

wow, as someone born in '97 seeing all these magazines and projects makes me wanna be born earlier :>. Fascinating dave!

The problem with the old Borland programs is they used an empty loop for time delays.

For anybody who is interested in the logic bits of this video, you might like the NAND2Tetris project. It starts you off with NAND gates, and you build a computer (that runs in a hardware simulator), develop a rudimentary OS, an assembler, compiler for a Java-like language, and eventually Tetris. It's quite fun!

thanks dave, was interesting to take a look at some dos pcb design tools.

Thanks to Logic Design class I'm taking right now, I can interpret these designs and understand what he says, first time I appreciate a class I'm taking as a student :D

Great stuff Dave!

The old Turbo/Borland Pascal bug which you hit is where the runtime library does a quick timing test to calibrate the Delay procedure... It counted how many times it looped in 1/18.2 seconds and computers faster than around 400MHz actually hit this bug.

You can tell these diagrams are 20 years old. They're way too neat for an experienced engineer.

Haha! Those notes were made in the summer midway through high school for me... Aww.... Now I feel old... I was half way through high school when half these commenters say that they were born. LOVE the little diversion on the Tek scope. That thing really was revolutionary. Article was spot on! ◔ᴗ◔

actually there was a patcher for the output pascal .exe files to fix the Runtime error 200 - you didn't need to recompile but I think I found it in around 2000 or somesuch

Nice trip down memory lane. :)

I learned a lot on the tds220 scopes. Never new the where as old as i am.

Very Good done and worked super on analyzer Thanks

I lot of the times I watch your videos and I am just in awe. I love the fact you used DOSBox to run your legacy projects; I am glad it had noble uses other than the games like I use it for haha!

Oh wow thanks for the nostalgia I remember using adv schematic pascal & Delphi in a job back in the early 90’s before I left Perth

Loved the nostalga here Dave......

Just want to say good job on thinking to switch to 50FPS. I didn't even watch the first 7 minutes of the video, I was just listening to it in the background, but when I came to check it out I immediately noticed it was better than 30FPS.

It smells like vintage :D hope so you showing us more of this.

I am 62 so good to see the old stuff I still use pascal ie Delphi !!!

Fancy full caps sourcecode :D. Really nice retro (I was playing in the sandbox at '95) insights for me. Thanks!

Around five years latter from when this project were published I would start to learn some electronics...

Hi Dave! I definitely agree with you! I am only 16 but I can tell you that you do learn a whole lot more when something goes wrong! I originally was just doing the raspberry pi and arduino thing until I realized that when something did not work, I had absolutely no clue how to troubleshoot it and figure out the source of the problem. I then started learning my basic electronics skills, heck I even went so far as to buy a copy of The Art of Electronics and read it from cover to cover. Anyways, thanks for all the awesome, informative and entertaining electronics videos! Keep up the good work! -Zack

Very interesting! Thanks :) The project is 1 year older than me :P

Nice one for 747 ;) I´m still using Protel ´99 on a Win98SE machine for my hobby electronics..... I´m pretty fast with it, due to my special 4 axis input decive (a mouse with a trackball on top), so i can navigate cursor and sheet independently; never change a running system :) I hate BP V7.0 for this bug!, and never use these "StarterKits" again, as it all depends on the software, when the software refuses to load, you won´t be able to use the hardware.... Long time ago i bought a Motorola DSP EVM56k board, it was great but the software runns in DOS native only (no dosbox!) up to 5.x so you would need an old PC just for this board;) it was also very famous that days, even prof. synthesizers uses these boards... Thanx for this one Dave!!! :)

At my college we still use a number of TDS 210's though we also have a number of TDS 2001c's. Those are the work horses for basic digital/analog classes.

This is quite inspiring! Looks like I have to develop some projects and work hard to keep up at least with 20s-Dave ;)

It would probably be very intresting if you temporarily forgot that the old one exists, then design and build a contemporary one (with same goals, like being not too hard to do yourself) and then compare both (comparing used parts, and comparing the design style from back then and now)

This video makes me feel both nostalgic and old haha

Haha, a used TDS 220 is my one and only scope, it's nearly as old as I am! Good to see you like it too :P

very nice latch headers Dave

I realize that this is an old video but I still write in Borland TP7.0. Even if you put the graph unit and the others in there the resulting compiled program would fail with runtime error 200. The CRT unit wasn't coded with the realization that computers would exceed 200MHz and the initialization code for the delay procedure would fail. TP7 still works great if you create or find a CRT unit replacement.

maybe you should do a modern version, based on an fpga, it would be interesting to see just how small and cheap it could be made today.

My first ISA board Logic analyser was made by the German company DLI way back 1995 . Was running on Windows 95

started with Turbo Pascal7 - sweet memories....

And here you can see the first advanced prototype of DaveCad++ :))) bigger screen, bigger resolution, gridlines, true color, hardware accelerated line drawing, infinity part database, auto-routing, two side PCB support, quick analog and digital simulation :)))

I'm really good on archiving ancient stuff and sort of bulk indexing it. Some of my -Rs cds are turning yellow. I combined a lot of these CD-Rs into DVD-Rs and saved space when I did it. I don't care about the totally obsolete Linux versions going yellow though. Some stuff I am NEVER going to use like Red Hat 3 or slackware or like 1994 Corel draw or something, so I don't know why I keep it. One pretty cool program came with like a Sound Galaxy card, voyetra midi studio or something. When I got to win7 none of it descendants would work, so I found a Japanese program that does the same things mostly. Also I use 'kxproject' for my Audigy2, and the synth implementation does not work properly in win7, so I got some sort of soft synth with loadable soundfonts to mimic the former ability. The kx days are ending because the end of the emu 10k chips, but I have like sound dsp flowchart conifgs for different things I am using my computer for. Very nice to use...

Great video Dave, reminds me of when I designed and built an EPROM programmer using the parallel port and using qbasic as the software, it worked great unfortunately my project wasn’t as pretty as yours was built on vero board wires sprouting out everywhere, remember taking it to a job interview and the scared look on the HR type person doing the interview I’ll never forget as I took it out of my bag, hehehe probably thought it was a bomb strangely enough I didn’t get the job :-) love your channel really great

Those notes are from literally a few weeks before I was born :)

I used Pascal, at that times - was in technical university... also used Turbo Vision... you remember? was still text based interface for Pascal but one of the first Object Oriented Language... Delfi came later... And there was Borland C and C++ I think I still have a book with Borland C++... Oooo my...

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Have you tried running the software via DOSbox but reducing the emulated CPU frequency? I wonder if that's an easy way to get around that Pascal bug.

Good evening dave!

I've started programming with B Pascal as well :D And it was over 20 years ago...

I do kinda miss dos based programs with their keyboard short cuts, and no-nonsense menus.

Hey, Dave, I see some extensions on your Chrome that I don't recognize. What are they?

I remember that error in crt.tpu - I believe that runtime error was a "division by 0" caused by the CPU being "so fast" it measured 0 on time to run through a delay loop. Oh those times ;)

We still use tds220 at school :) But we also have new Hameg 4000

Cool, I'm already printing the schematics!!! Any plans of a new version with CPLDs or FPGAs?? Question they still use Delphi at Altium? By the way in Brazil people, still use delphi a lot :P

Day, month, year. Thank you.

It's never a laughing matter when someone loses a dongle.

We still have TDS 210s in my school. Just in the basics lab, so the students don't destroy the more expensive ones right away.

This is a good video!

Omgwtflol?! I've just spent the last hour or so trying to figure out if I should spend $20 on the (discontinued) USBee AX for access to their PC suite or attempt soldering SMD's with JYT Tech's 1-Ch 200khz DSO138 DiY Kit for access to a nice TFT and Arm development board? And then I see the title on this EEVBlog, uploaded just a few hours ago...Exactly what I've been trying to understand about the USBee is the PC Based Logic Analyzer advantage and weather it grants access to an Oscilloscope portion of the software or not? 😟

legacy dave :0) awesome , love the channel

I used to program in Pascal. Made a sniffer program in Pascal and later modded it to have encryption. Was crappy encryption but encryption nun the less :) Simply taking the ASCII character value and + a set number to it and writing the result to a file. Then do decrypted you just - the value :)

I started out using DC-CAD and I could jam out work using one hand on the mouse and the other hitting the hot keys without even thinking about it. BTW, the Borland CPU speed bug patch is a hot patch. You don't need to recompile the code, you just run the patch. The bug was in the start up code and is/was in a known area of the EXE file. I still have a copy of it just in case I have to reinstall some old Borland based tool. My old DOS cross compilers run just fine id DOSBox.

great tube! I notice on ebay the TDS220 is selling for $500! crazy.

Great to see. Same creativity and detail, but today's tools would save a lot of the repetitive work. And some of the useful thinking?

ispLSI were discontinued? Damnit.. I've still got a few dozen of those around and planned to use them in an upcoming project. Any hints whether the programming software which supports that series can still be obtained?

I will have to check tomorrow...but I think my University Department still uses those TDS220 scopes!

Aaaand now in 2020 I'm using TDS1012B oscilloscope. ))) So... It's definitely not bad.

Used Protel at Practel electronics. Did you ever write programs to auto generate changes to text file pcb file. For like generating Buses or large Memory layout. Before Autotrax and was faster than autotrax for repeated layouts

Actually your voice sounds much better today ;)

I use 5mm grid paper when laying out circuits for pad or stripboard, there's not that many tools for that on the market (or free for that matter), and it sometimes happen I go the TeukkaEDA(tm) route for very simple designs or ideas. A stack of gridded (and lined and blank) notepads is always useful. So, Davealyzer Mk I design notes ? *continues to watch*

Hi Dave, use your minion to do a voiceover when you catch a cold, just write the stuff down and let him read it while you show and point with your hands

I think you need to configure memory for speed in Autotrax. I remember my refresh being instant. See Silicon Chip "Hands-On PC Board Design For Beginners; Pt.1 - February 2004".

Heck, we used these TDS 220s in EE lab... a few years ago. Poland, so backwards. You seem to love the word "basically" Dave. It's anything but basic - pretty good design. You could replace these 72ACs with modern equivalents to solve the issue. And of course replace the CPLDs with modern small FPGAs. You can still do it the old schematic way, I've experimented with that in Xilinx and Altera tools - it still works. Why would you compile it in original Turbo Pascal when there's Free Pascal and is 100% compatible? :)

That power supply section is a bit how ya doin'... Just kidding Dave, nice video. Maybe you could get your software re-compiled with the necessary patch and get it operational again?

wow you worked on this on my second birthday XD

This is cool!

just waiting to see if someone in the community made one of these.

Hmm make my old memories come back.

I still use Autotrax on a Win 10 machine. Then its loaded into Altium to generate the gerbers!! I can generate a artwork 10 times faster than in Altium.

What did that LCD do to deserve all that poking around 40:00?

Runtime error 200 it's a bug in Crt module, not in grafics ;-)

Hey! I'm still using lsi1016 with lpt download cable ;)

OOPS! EEVblog looks like you are pointing to the input buffers but are actually talking about the SRAM at 21:17 to 21:50. Gotcha! ;-)

717 hand-drilled holes.... phew! We really are spoiled rotten these days, with so many cheap PCB fabs to choose from.

hi dave, is there a modern chip that be utilised in place of the discontinued ones?. i know there are loads of cpld/dev kits could be made to work, but i want to know about direct replacements. thanks, aly.

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