Come join us on October 21 at 7PM ET for our monthly meeting, currently over Zoom for due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
This month’s TPUG special guest is Joe Casale, founder and president of comspec. In the height of commodore’s time, comspec was one of the first to develop hardware accessories for commodore computers and was instrumental in getting Commodore computers into schools. Comspec also ran several retail stores in Toronto.
From Joe Casale:
After having used the Intel 4004, and 8008, for real world data collection, my first commodore computer was the Kim-1 . I used it primarily to learn 6502 machine language. It was cheaper and more convenient to use because it had a hex keypad and a tape recorder interface. Also it made interfacing with the outside world easy because of it already had a user port for the outside world connections.
My second Commodore machine was the original Commodore Pet (personal electronic transactor). It was better than anything around for my purposes because it came with, a full qwerty chicklet keypad, a real CRT monitor, a built is tape recorder and and ieee 488 bus And it also had a user port for outside world connections.
The main use for these machines were custom automation and data collection projects.
Commodore eventually produced the Pet with a full size keyboard , needing an external tape recorder.
When Commodore produced the first disk drive, the 4040 I was asked by the Toronto Institute of Medical Technology if I could help them out. They had heard of the work I was doing with some of the labs in Ontario and wanted to know if I could build them something that would allow them to share a printer and a disk drive because they wanted to set up a lab of Pet computers and they did not have enough budget to provide a printer and disk drive for each computer. Of course I said yes and that became the first of many labs of Pet computers that I sold.
Things progressed from that, as my company Comspec went on to build a similar system for the commodore 64, and 128. When the Commodore acquired the Amiga computer, we went on to build the first memory expansion board for the Amiga 1000, Amiga 500 and all the Amigas that followed. We also built the first internal and external SCSI hard drive systems for all of the Amiga computers. This was before Commodore had their own hard drive electronics. The commodore peripherals built by Compspec were able to operate on every amiga computer right to the end.
During the Comodore years, Comspec ran a few business, Comspec Systems for business, Comspec retail, Electronics 2001, and Computer Variables and we were very active at all World of Commodore shows.
Our thanks to Ben Kayfetz for arranging out guest for the evening! 🙂
Topic: TPUG Monthly Meeting For October 2021: Joe Casale
Time: Oct 21, 2021 07:00 PM America/Toronto
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