I've always wanted to try my hand at some hardware hacking, and so I recently got hold of a Southern Cross kit. This is a z80-based single-board computer, with a serial port that can hook up to a modern computer.

Here's all the stuff that came in the kit:


I also went to Frys and got a new soldering iron (Veleman, temperature controlled), one of those things with two little adjustable clamps and a magnifying glass, a digital multimeter, and an antistatic wrist strap. All this stuff came to $44! Unbelievable - I'm sure it would have cost me a couple of hundred UKP when I was growing up.

I'm tagging this post 'lisp' because eventually I'll be putting some kind of Lisp system on the kit. Probably a hand-assembled interpreter, just like the original that S.R. Russell wrote after reading McCarthy's 1960 paper, "Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, part I".

While I'm building the hardware I'll tag these posts 'z80' and 'hardware'. When I'm done, and I start on the software, I'll tag them 'z80' and 'lisp' again.