WHAT HAPPENED? WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!

It's been 20 years since I last updated this site, having left things on a bit of a cliffhanger - What happened with those systems I saw on eBay? What has happened in those 20 years?! A lot has happened.

Holly, my girlfriend at the time, convinced me to contact the seller to make an offer so I did. John was a really nice guy who had gotten the computers from his uncle. His uncle saved them from being scrapped as he had worked on them and couldn't bare to see them thrown out, but years later he couldn't look after them any more so John then took them. It came to the time that John couldn't keep them any more so I ended up buying the lot from him at the opening bid price, which was around $400 if I remember correctly. I borrowed a van from a friend, bribed another mate to drive it and help me move it all home.

For the next year or so, the machines lived in the kitchen/dining area where I worked on them. I got simple programs running on the first Nova 3 by entering them in binary via the front panel - mainly simple stuff to test the processor, instructions, and print strings to a terminal. I didn't have much success with the second Nova 3, which had MOS RAM, but I considered that a parts machine.

The Eclipse S/130 basic processor functionality worked without issues until I noticed a burning smell after a minute or so of being powered up. The cause was a wirewound resistor that turned into a bar heater due to conducting excessive current. It left a toasty brown mark on the power supply PCB as a result. I consulted the schematic and found that the only way this was possible was if a nearby capacitor had become internally shorted. Replacing the capacitor fixed the problem and I played with the machine extensively after that, especially considering how much lovelier the front panel was compared to the one on the Nova 3. I never got around to booting an operating system though, but I am happy that I didn't trip any circuit breakers or destroy anything either.

Half way through 2006, Holly told me she had decided to move to Edinburgh in Scotland to study and that she was leaving in a month. This turned my world a bit topsy-turvy and my focus was turned to putting everything into storage, moving back with my parents to save money to travel, and eventually getting to Edinburgh 5 months or so later by which time the relationship between Holly and I was over and unable to be rekindled. It's better to have tried and failed than not tried at all. I ended up staying there for 8 months and made some good friends, had some great times, and just made the most of it under the circumstances. Also, as a result of boredom and poverty, I wrote a simple Nover simulator/debugger in C.

Upon my return to Australia, I ended up living in a couple of sharehouses, living alone in a flat, sponging from the parents, and being in a long term relationship that ended after 8 years. My late twenties had become my thirties and then forties and now in 2025 I'm almost a couple of years shy of turning fifty. My Data General gear has been in storage all through that period, occasionally getting a visit when I moved cells or to show them off to friends. Now I'm slowly getting motivated to work on them again. I think this needs to happen in the very near future.

Yeah, that's me on the right. Amazing what twenty years can do.