Sphere: The Book, Coming Soon!
The Sphere history book manuscript is nearly done. A preorder campaign is coming soon!
Hi folks! This is a quick update on my Sphere history book project, and it’s a good one: the text is written (and rewritten, and rewritten…), and I’ve now begun the steps needed to turn it into an actual book. I think it’s going to be pretty good.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Sphere Corp in Bountiful, Utah. In March 1975, Mike Wise and some other enterprising young people started designing the most interesting personal computer that the world has since forgotten about. I hope to remedy that a bit!
Sphere Corp, like many of the early micro makers, kickstarted their company with up-front preorders, and funnily enough, I’ll be publishing the book the same way. I explored a number of options, and determined that self-publishing using crowdfunding is the best way of producing a high-quality book that can reach the right audience. There will be a crowdfunding campaign coming up in the next few months. This will support professional editing, design, image licensing, and of course, actual printing. More on all that soon; you will be the first to hear of it.
This newsletter has been deathly quiet for a long time because I’ve been hellbent on finishing the manuscript. But! I ended up having to cut some compelling stories from the book because they were too tangential or technical. That was a bummer, but the upside is that now I have researched material for posts that will live online and in this newsletter instead. These include the rise and fall of an early software publisher, the FORTH that wasn’t, evapotranspiration in France (!), and other tales that intersect with the Sphere story but didn’t fit in the book for one reason or another.
Anyway, those are the key things: 1. There’s a crowdfunding/preorder campaign for the book coming up soon, and 2. there’ll be more regular fun newsletters starting imminently.
The final Sphere-related item I have for you is that as a side-project-to-the-side-project, I cooked up a 5¼” floppy disk controller a while back. Sphere never had such a disk controller for various reasons, and it allows a Sphere to boot the FLEX operating system (a CP/M-like OS for the 6800). Given the minuscule audience and the reliance on 1970s parts, it’s as much art project as anything else, but I’m pleased with how it came out. A bit more here for now, but I’ll have a detailed write up of what the challenges there were.
Stay tuned! And happy computing,
Ben Z.