RIP, Don Lancaster

Heard earlier this week that Don Lancaster, best known to us retrocomputing denizens as the man who developed the TV Typewriter, died at the age of 83 on June 7. That's my copy of one of his classic books (after the TV Typewriter Cookbook) for building a TVT 6 5/8 on anything with a 6800 bus like the 6502 and, yes, the 6800. This was a CPU-driven display that uses lines on the address bus to control the image: you lost 36K out of your addressing range as any address stored to or read there would be passed to the display interface, but gained an entire viewing screen in exchange. Even a barebones 1K KIM-1 could display a 32x16 text screen at $0200 to $03ff and it could be built out of just a handful of chips:

Haven't gotten around to building one of my own but I really should; it would be a fitting bit of fun. Cheap video was hardly enough to keep him occupied; he had an almost intimidating number of links up on his home page which fortunately seems well preserved for posterity. Godspeed and rest in peace.