Your Stories

If you installed, maintained, used or even deisgined KBX 100 Herald /Pentara please send me your stories.

This from

Peter Jennings

Hi Hywel,

What can I tell you about Pye TMC and Herald that you don't already know?

I found you by a circuitous route. I follow an Australian video blogger, Dave Jones, EEVBlog, on YouTube and watched this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnrtneFP_6A&t=2s

Which recounts his tribulations rushing to get a prototype ready for an exhibition whilst suffering from some bug. I was reminded of a similar experience and commented:-

"Yup, been there, done that, got the tea shirt. I can remember back in the late 70s or early 80s working for a Philips Group company TMC on a small telephone exchange (suitable for an office or small company). We were only a team of 3 or 4 engineers and I was the guy who wrote the assembler code for the Signetics 2650 microprocessor that controlled it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signetics_2650. This was ground breaking stuff, nobody had made anything like it. Our customer was the GPO, later to become BT (British Telecom) and their team of engineers was coming tomorrow to see a working proof of concept, not even a prototype. They could forgive a heap of breadboard hardware, but it had to work. Everyone else went home, their work was done, but I worked on into the night to make something that would show most of the features we had claimed for it. I can't remember when I eventually left, some time in the early hours. I turned up the following morning, had a successful demonstration. The company was awarded the "real" development contract. We switched from Signetics to Intel 8080 for this phase. I too was really under the weather, I think I was coming down with influenza that night. For those of you playing along at home it became the KBX100 and later versions were known as Herald or Pentara. TMC sold over £70 million worth of them to GPO / BT in the end. There's even a whole web site devoted to the exchange, http://herald.illtyd.co.uk/home."

So you got a mention, as I'd come across your site when looking for information to refresh my memory. "For those of you playing along at home" is a catch phrase from most of his videos.

Where do you fit in? Do you have any connection with this or any other project?

Regards,

Peter.