[GreenKeys] Irv Hoff (more info about Telegrapy by Freebody)

[Jerry]

Just thought I would add my 2-cents worth.  Irv put the first computer on 
rtty on the ham bands in the late 1960's.  It was the Datapoint 2200, which 
he paid over 10K for while the rest of us struggled to pay $400 bucks for 
our little Altairs/Imsai's, etc.    I always assumed he bought that 
particular one because of Vic Poor, who was a VP at Datapoint at the time 
(if I recall that correctly) was Irv's good friend.. He wrote software that 
would run on his Datapoint computer and then wrote other versions that ran 
on 8080's for the rest of us.

The thing that always amazed me was how all the 8080 software he wrote on 
that thing, he was never able to run any of it.  He used to download it over 
the autostart net on 3612.5Khz to those of us there, and we would load it, 
and then try and run it.  Then we reported back to him what had happened and 
he would fix the various things that cropped up.  I recall he finally got a 
Heathkit after a couple of years and finally was able to run some of it 
locally.  He settled on the Heath line because Heath was the only computer 
at the time to implement interrupts.  It caused a lot of us to run out and 
buy interrupt cards for our 'other' computers, such as Altair-Mits, and 
Imsai's, etc.

He developed a program to download a lot of the stuff using the Intel hex 
format, and then decode it back into running object code which we then used. 
I must have yards and yards of paper with hex dumps on it, along with the 
source code still out in my archives.

Later on in years when I got my hands on some Frederick TU's along with all 
the documentation, it became evident that he had used a lot of ideas from 
their line of hardware to develop first the old TTL2 and then the later ST-6 
line of terminal units.  I built the 2nd or 3rd ST-6 after he finished the 
design.  Bill Sherwood, w6fby, ugly wired up the first one based on Irv's 
designs, Irv built the second one based on the 'board set' he and George 
Hutchison worked up for the rest of us, and I built up the 3rd unit while at 
George's home in Santa Clara, CA one weekend all those many years ago.

I used it for several years until I got a commercial unit sold by Hal 
Communictions, who had purchased the rights to it from Irv as I understand 
it.  Both worked equally well, but of course the Hal unit was prettier!  As 
a note of interest, I actually just 'found' my old home-built version in the 
home of the ham I had given it to some 40 years ago.  I rescued it and 
dusted it off and am planning on firing it up to see if it still works!

Irv never talked much about his education, and was always sort of ashamed of 
being just a pilot.  It was only on the Compuserve Cancer forum right before 
he died that he talked about it one night.  He had a 'PHD in Nuclear 
Physicis' which he jokingly referred to as 'Piled Higher and Deeper'.. His 
father also had a PHD in something and was a professor at some University 
back east, but Irv ended up flying airplanes.  He was in the Korean war and 
the Air Force made a bomber pilot out of him, and when he got out, he found 
he could make three or four times the money that he could make if he 
followed in his fathers footsteps.  He was always sorry he had 'dumbed down' 
to earn a living, but it really benefited the rest of us.  He only worked 5 
or 6 days a month and all the rest of that time, he wrote software for the 
rest of us.  He was a very brilliant person and we all lost a heck of a 
resource when he died.

Jerry -n6jp-

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Just thought I'd share a little more info about why I'm specifically looking
for a copy of "Telegraphy" by JW Freebody as opposed to some other historic
treatise on telegraphy - I learned about this book while listening to an
interview with Vic Poor, who, among other things, was head of R&D at
Datapoint where ARC (later ARCNet) was developed in the mid-70s. In the
interview, Poor mentions that the arcnet local area network protocol was
based on a networking protocol developed by AT&T to link multiple teletypes,
and that Freebody describes this protocol in his book, "Telegraphy". I'm
restoring several Datapoint terminals and researching the history of the
company, thus my interest in obtaining a copy of this book.

Vic has deep connections to our community - before arriving at Datapoint (it
was actually Computer Terminal Corporation - CTC - when he was hired), he
was one of the founders of Frederic Electronics and much of the technology
developed for "intelligent" switches and TUs at Frederic found its way into
Datapoint terminals. The Datapoint 2200, developed as a programmable
terminal emulator, was actually a standalone computer with mass storage,
programmable memory and a full instruction set. Vic took that instruction
set to a start-up semiconductor manufacturer with the desire of reducing the
chip count in the 2200, where the computing logic was implemented in
standard ttl. The semiconductor manufacturer was Intel and the result of the
Datapoint contract was the 8008, Intel's first 8-bit processor. In the end,
Datapoint never used the chip and Intel went on to develop the line into the
8080, etc., but that's another story...

There are other connections as well - Vic is a ham and was a big RTTY fan in
the '50s. He hired Jonathan Schmidt, first at Frederic and then at
CTC/Datapoint. Jonathan had been Irv Hoff's roomate at the University of
Michigan and was instrumental in Irv's TU designs. He later became the
"system architect" for the Datapoint 2200. Irv was close to both companies -
his review of the Frederic 1200 has been posted to Greenkeys and he actually
used a Datapoint 2200 for RTTY work.

Hope this is of interest.

best,
Jack