I first came across a SWTP 6800 when my Uncle (who ran a building firm) decided to buy one to "to the accounting and payroll". They quickly figured out they needed someone who could "drive" a computer. As they knew I had a Sinclair ZX81, at 17 I was introduced to this SWTP - the heart of a specifically written (in Basic) builders payroll and accounting system - named "FBS" (Franklin Builders System). The main system unit had an external disk enclosure (2 x 8" floppy disks), a Terminal with keyboard and finally an Epson MX80 dot matrix tractor printer. I was quickly able to use this SWTP for the payroll (70+ employees) and as a result, two part time clerks were let go, as their roles were consumed by the SWTP! (A harbinger of things to come?). I was running most office functions on this PC, payroll, job costing, orders, accounts payable, balance sheet, other ledgers. All on a single 8" floppy disk! I started writing programs (in BASIC) of my own, one was to automatically "pay" invoices when a cheque was entered. The original program laboriously presented you with one invoice after another and asked "would you like to pay this"? I even managed to used Basic commands to invent a new "graphical" character set to make the menus bigger and more interesting. You could see each character being quickly drawn! Ah, Happy days.

While in medical school in 1978, I bought and built a SWTPC 6800, with CPU, SS-50 bus, and 4k static ram card. Couldn''t afford an ASCII kbd ($$300!) and had no display - so a friend retrieved a Burroughs 32 character Plasma display (Ascii parallel interface) and a kbd removed from a pulp and paper mill - but it had 5-bit Hollerith-encoded outputs. Rewrote the monitor in EPROM to do the kbd code translation to ascii, and to make display on the 32 character display work. Later added a custom board to do file read/write to tape, based on software that directly drove an op amp connected to the audio-in of a stereo cassette deck. Had to add a 1 MHz crystal to the board (replaced the RC circuit) - Then added a board that mapped memory to an 80 x 24 character monochrome video display, and a massive 16kb dynamic memory board. Then with tiny basic (3.95kb), was able to program to heart''s content. It played star trek too.

I worked with a brilliant engineer named Charlie Moore at a GM plant doing manufacturing R$D. When micros came out we wanted to experiment with one to see how it worked. Our IT people had to approved any computer purchase. They refused, claiming any micro was a toy and unusable in business. We called SWTP and told them our purchasing dept was sending them a RFQ for a "machine controller". They were to quote $395 and when a purchase order came in, ship the 6800 Kit always calling it a "machine controller" in all correspondence. We hooked it to an old ASR-33 teletype machine and later a tape recorder (Kansas City Std) By the time IT found out we had it, we were building a 16 channel high speed data acquisition system for our Detroit Diesel Test Dept for $71K that DEC could not touch for under $500K. Charlie wrote software and I designed hardware. Charlie was using an assembler he bought from a tiny startup named "Microsoft". Several times I answered the phone and the voice at the end asked, " Is Charlie Moore there? This is Bill Gates."