Geoff’s department had a new PhD student, Chris White, working in this field who was willing to take on the task of software design. I suggested that the RCA ‘COSMAC’ 1802 microprocessor could form the basis of a hardware design. The processor and associated components were all manufactured by RCA in CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) which had a number of advantages over the more usual PMOS / NMOS technologies at that time - very low power consumption, static operation, allowing the processor clock to be slowed to further reduce power usage and wide operational temperature range.

I was able to purchase a cross assember for the processor to run on the University mainframe computer as it was for teaching purposes... I then threw Chris in at the deep end of software development as he was required to learn assembler language programming for what was a quite esoteric processor! For those of you who have never experienced the challenge of writing assembler code for a small microprocessor let me tell you it’s not the easiest thing in the world!

I put together a basic hardware design. Geoff, Dick & Chris were all involved with the design specification into what was to eventually become known as the WindLogger. I think we purchased an RCA Cosmac development kit for the processor and was able to put together a prototype based on my design. This was then used to take the code development forward – software design for a real time system like this requires testing with actual hardware. Can’t remember how this actually happened but by this time I had a number of small micros coupled up to the University network via serial links, mostly running at the amazing speed of 9600 baud - that’s about a 1000 bytes / characters per second! Assembled code could be downloaded into a microcomputer, probably an 8 bit system running cp/m and then transferred to the Cosmac development kit where it could be tested.

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