In between the serious tasks of project work, there was also some time for experimentation. At one point, Tom Jelsing wanted to run an experiment with a receiver for time signals from a radio transmitter in Germany. The receiver was connected to an LED dot-matrix display and a microprocessor to receive and decode the signal and display it. The whole thing was mounted at the entrance to the technical department and, in addition to switching between displaying the exact time and date, it also showed a scrolling welcome display with the department number and the initials of the employees. As far as I know, a time receiver was never incorporated into a B&O product.
When the Beocord 8000 was launched, before there was a Beomaster 8000 to control it over the link system, some IR receivers were made that could be connected to a Beocord so it could be controlled remotely. As the codes for the link system and for the remote control were the same, it was a simple and easy solution.
Another side project was an emulator for an HP terminal. B&O used HP minicomputers for various tasks in the development department. Unfortunately, their terminals were quite expensive, so Erik Bækgaard started a small project to use a BBC Micro computer as a terminal instead. I wrote a program that could emulate the codes in an HP terminal. It was burned into an EPROM and mounted in a number of BBC computers and used for several years.
Some of the staff in the project groups also experimented with some small programming projects in their spare time. At one point, someone wanted to be able to automatically turn down the thermostats on their radiators. Ib Hald from the tape recorder department made a small box with a display, keyboard, speaker and a processor that could control eight outputs. The outputs could be connected to Nichrome wire wound around the inside of the thermostats. By sending a current from the outputs, the wire could heat the thermostats so they closed or turned down the heat. The unit could be programmed for each output on the day of the week and time of start and stop. The unit could also be programmed as an alarm clock, and I used an “Ib’s beeper” for many years as a clock and alarm clock.
Ib also built a debug helper for a TRS-80 home computer. It was a small box with four hexadecimal dials to select an address and a connector to connect to the computer. Each time the address appeared on the computer’s address bus, a short beep would sound on a speaker. This would test whether a program was executing code or accessing data at a particular address, or how often and for how long the instruction was executed or data was read or written. This was a great help in debugging programs.
B&O was occasionally asked to give talks on various topics to school students. It was my job to talk to some of them about microprocessors, their development and their use in B&O products. This was done either at B&O or in the schools. After one of these talks at B&O, we had some morning coffee and I sat next to a teacher who was interested in languages. He had wondered where I came from, as my pronunciation of English technical terms did not match Danish pronunciation, but there was nothing unusual about my Danish pronunciation. His assessment was that I was Danish but had lived for some time in an English-speaking country. I also held some internal microprocessor courses, mostly for employees in the development department, and one external night school course in Struer.
It was a great deal of work to prepare the internal courses, as well as review the answers from the home assignments. There was a course in microprocessor programming, and an advanced microprocessor programming course. They were based on the Rockwell 6502 microprocessor, with an AIM 65 as the development system. The document for the introductory course is 40 pages, printed on an Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer. The advanced course is 18 pages plus some pages of assignments, all in Danish. Scanned copies of these are available in the Danish version of this chapter.
In 1982, Radio Midt og Vestjylland made a program where they had some conversations between professionals in different fields, including microprocessors at B&O. It was Kai Rostrup Jensen who was interviewed, and the conversation with me was about the choice of microprocessor for the Beocenter 7000, where he was the project manager, although this had actually happened about five years earlier. I recorded the broadcast on cassette tape and later transferred it to an mp3 file, which I played for Kai and others almost exactly 30 years after the recording was made. The recording, in Danish, is available in the Danish version of this chapter as an mp3 file that can be downloaded or played.
Next chapter: Personal
Microprocessors in B&O consumer products 