[mhandley]

Back in the early 1980s when I was maybe 15 I got one of the first Jupiter Ace computers. The Ace never sold well, so there wasn't a lot of software or hardware available, and even if there had been I didn't have the money. My school didn't offer computer science, so I arranged to cycle across town to another school that did. They had just got two Research Machines 380z's and were throwing out the ASR-33 they had previously used. Of course I scavenged it and took it home.

I'd previously built a parallel port for the Ace on veroboard from TTL logic, based on a design a friend of mine came up with for his ZX Spectrum, so I could use the Ace to ride around on a micromouse. To drive the ASR-33, I had a 24v smoothed power supply that I'd scavenged from a skip when my mother's employer had scrapped some prototype ATMs (cash dispensers), so I wired that up to give +/- 12V and switched that from one line on the parallel board using some power transistors desoldered from the ATM. Then I wrote code to bit-bang 110baud RS232 in Forth on the Ace. It took a lot of trial and error, as there wasn't exactly a lot of documentation available in the town library, but I got there in the end.

I'm not sure if I was the only person who ever had a printer connected to a Jupiter Ace, but I'm pretty sure I was the only person to print Ace code listings to an ASR-33. I wish I still had that ASR-33 but somewhere along the way my parents decided they were fed up with storing all my junk, asked what I wanted saving, and I didn't think to save that.