Re: Marcel van Kervinck
Posted: Sat May 30, 2020 5:41 am
From another forum:
It is with deepest regrets that I announce the death on Tuesday 26th May 2020 of Marcel van Kervinck - the creator of the Gigatron TTL Computer.
Marcel passed peacefully following a long illness. First surgery and then immuno-therapy failed him. He gave up the struggle two days ago - aged in his early 50's.
To regular readers of the Gigatron forum, it was clear that in recent weeks he had increasing health problems, but none of us knew the full extent.
Marcel created the Gigatron in the Spring of 2017, based on his earlier idea to produce a VGA video generator from TTL counters, a RAM and a ROM. His progress and clever insights with the Gigatron architecture was fully documented in a series of posts to Hackaday.io
Within a year he had created the prototype, a double sided pcb, a full kit of parts, and written all the low level and high level software.
The community embraced such an elegant and comprehensive design, and it was not long before there was an assembler, an emulator, Tiny BASIC, Wozmon, a virtual 6502 which can run Commodore floating point BASIC - and just recently a fully compiled, modern BASIC with advanced string handling and other essential features. One of the last projects was a fully operational "clone" of an Apple-1 running 6502 code on the Gigatron hardware.
Approximately 1000 kits have been sold to date, (Edit - the 1000th kit was sold today) and there is sufficient stock to last the next couple of months, after which no more will be produced. Marcel's project partner, Walter, will handle the final sales and shipping until the current stock is depleted.
The project has been open sourced, and the manual will appear online as a legacy for the wider retro-computing community.
The original breadboard prototype has been gifted to a computing museum in the Netherlands.
