Bickerton folding bicycle

 Changed; 24-10-2024, 25-10-2024

The bicycle is now running well, and I like it.  It is, as is said of it, a floppy frame.  Trying to not lean or pull on the handlebars is difficult, and they will slip back or forward to the stops, but that issue is now improved by fitting a stronger handlebar locking bolt. 

 

     

 

I have added the rack and replaced the handlebar locking bolt with a stronger bolt, but I now need spanners to fold the bike.  The handlebars still move back and forth as I cycle, though, but not so much so my ride is better.  I am advised that a stronger seat pillar clamp is available now, but what I have done works well enough.

Frame number; A3249 made in about 1976, is the date on the variable speed hub.

Weight; 9Kg.  MK1, a British-made, lightweight, aluminium frame bike since 1972.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bickerton_(bicycle)

3-speed AW gear hub dated August 1976.  I have greased the water-repelling labyrinths.  Put the hub bearing nuts back with the slack corrected, which fixed the grinding when I got the bike and have over-oiled the hub which washed out a little rust.

These bikes could be purchased in 1977 in USA from UK for; $360 plus postage. About £200. I don't know what the price was in the UK?

The handlebars fold down to form the bike's

stand.  But a side stand can be fitted.

The sprockets are; 13 and 57 tooth.  The gearing is quite high, and the bike is poor for hill climbing.  The five-speed hub option would give lower and higher speeds.  The bike is a low speed bike and goes fast enough but it feels like a lower gear would be helpful on hills. 

 

The bikes gearing in metres per pedal stroke; 

1. Gear 2.1 m/stroke is only a little lower than 2nd on my Universal adult bike.
2. Gear 2.8 m/stroke, is a little lower than 3rd gear on my Universal adult bike. 
3. Gear 3.7 m/stroke, is higher than my Lenton but lower than my Peugeot sports bikes highest speeds. 

In conclusion the bike is not capable of very low speed unlike a modern stiff frame short wheelbase bikes. 

This original version Bickerton is made with off the shelf parts, aluminium tubes, rod, and beam, with minimal machining and cutting, bolted together.  There is no aluminium welding, though that is a good method of joining parts because it does not fracture unlike steel welding that is brittle and does.

I purchased the bike in September 2024.  It has been used for parts, so I scavenging parts for the bike.  The bike is very maintainable and despite the manual warning to not take the gear hub apart, they both don't need much maintenance but for oiling they can be dissembled if you take lots of care, and read up on how to do that, the parts put back the right way and don't disassemble them more than you need too to clean or replace a pawl spring say.  AW hubs if oiled regularly can be going fine at 1 million miles and 40 years on a postman's bike for example. 

Engine oil is a good general-purpose oil for the transmission you can also use grease on the cable parts and the sliding tubes.  Don't use 3-in-one oil inside the gear hub but it's okay on the chain as it leaves a hard protective coating.

The bike is allowed on most trains and buses folded and depending on guard, driver discretion and company policy full-size bikes are often allowed off-peak. 

No bike side stand is fitted but you can unlock, move and lock the handlebars to use those as a stand, the manual suggests or have a side stand fitted as an extra.

 

The removal of the rear wheel requires loosening the seat post clamp and moving it a little.   Once I put the washer back on the hub and the one with the anti-rotation washers on each hub side of the shaft with the locators facing out to the frame, the pair of down tubes were extremely tight and scrapped aluminium when I moved them.  The flats on the shaft are now horizontal but they were probably intended to be in line with the diagonal tubes to the seat post, which is also difficult to do and seems less than ideal.

Making do and mend with parts, I have adapted, such as a pipe clamp and a piece of metal tubing for the gear cable anchor.

For newer Bickerton bikes the tube from the seat post is bolted to the horizontal tube rather than sharing the hub shaft. 

All the tubes have been greased, fortunately, so they do slide as they should, leaving a silver of grease and aluminium on your hands though.  The bike became much less wobbly to ride once I had greased the steering bearing, that can be the case with other bikes.  Unsurprisingly, lubricating and correcting adjustments have made the bike lighter to ride.

A tool bag attached to the tube between the seat post lock and the crank would be useful.

The Bell chimes ding-dong on push then release.

The bike feels strange to ride, it is necessary to start in low gear 1 of 3, but it did not take many rides to learn to ride it.  The direction I go in is determined by the way I wobble, more than any other bike I have ridden.  The bike is best not ridden fast.  The pedals are nearer the ground than any other bikes I've ridden and can hit the ground, the manual warns to not let a pedal scrape the ground when leaning into a corner.  The bike is heavy to pedal up hills and would be helped by having a lower gear provided by a 5-speed gear hub option or a lower speed more tooth cog.

Bikes do vary in how light comfortable, heavy, uncomfortable or stable they are, but there is no real rule about what frame design feature results in.  This is the lightest adult bike I've experienced and heaviest to pedal but for its very low speed and low gearing.  Postwar long-wheelbase bikes were the best of the best when Raleigh was at its height.  This bike has shorter 60mm pedal arms compared to the normal 70mm that adult bikes have had for at least the past 80 years, but that is not enough to make the bike noticeably heavier to pedal.

The handlebar; one of the locking bolts was rusted and thread ruined, in any case, another did not lock the handlebars well.  I replaced it with a bolt and a wing nut, but better still was a blind bolt with internal locking, foil wrapped around it a washer and a nut.  Finally, I found a smaller-sized metric nut, that an old 1/2" ring spanner fitted tightly on.  The ride is now much better, although the handlebars do slide, but less so. 

• I am advised that a modern seat post clamp would do a better job clamping the handlebars.  Having said that, what I have done is a good solution. 
  

• In mitigation Bickerton says that the floppyness of the handlebars is intensional allowing the cyclist to lean back and pedal harder on hills.  They also say it takes getting used but I worried about falling off backwards.
  

Greasing the steering bearings needed a stop pin to be pressed out. 

• The pin is a C-shaped roll of spring steel, tapered on both ends so it can be pressed back in from either end. I used a vice with the jaws open a little to press against and flat tool against the pin and a hammer.

• The bearings were clean but dry, which I greased with Castrol LM grease.

• The bearing nut was screwed tight, to ensure that the thread runs smoothly, then slacked to finger tight then held at 1/4 to 1/2 turn slack and the locking nut tightened onto it.

• The pin was then hammered back in using the tool again between the pin to hammer against.

• The pins function as stops. The steering now does not have any stiffness, consequently, the bike is now a little less wobbly to ride.

• Then a sawn-off nail tip to give a filed flat end nail to hammer the pin through the hole and out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The seat is nearly over the back wheel hub, so be careful leaning back, and it also feels necessary to be careful when braking hard and falling forward.  The bike is okay riding at 3-8MPH if it is all clear around you at 2.5MPH walking speed but 12MPH is a bit fast, but the bike is stable.  The bike is good for short-distance rides of 1 km or so on fairly flat terrain with wobble room. 

 

A bicycle rack was added. Many of the welds broke on it over the 50 years since I purchased it, it also broke the fixings on my Lenton Sports.  I have used tie wraps and pipe clamps to hold it, and I am hoping they will not need to be taken off or cut to take the back wheel off.  Taking the rear wheel off is in any case difficult. 

The cyclist needs to take care to not let what is carried overhang the front sides of the rack.  If you do what you carry will hit your heels, but correct it don't push the pedals from the bridge of your feet, which is not good for your orthopaedic health and will result in needing more effort to go.

 

https://www.bickertonportables.co.uk/wp-content/themes/twentytenfive/images/bickerton-story.pdf 

https://starostneradost.wordpress.com/tag/bickerton/

 

The author created the web page whilst he was putting this bike back together for a friend. 

https://jepspectro.com/htm/bickerton.htm

 

The Bickerton Facebook group is useful and there is a bike manual, which has a nice informative storytelling style, in the files section.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Bickerton

The sliding spanner on one pedal for unscrewing it to stow it out of the way; 

The sliding spanner for unscrewing and removing the pedal.  The hole in the frame is for storing the pedal but it is a thread clearance hole with no extra clearance for a grommet.  The thread is anti-clockwise, so it tends to tighten as you pedal.

It is like an anti-theft device, but I am sure the aluminium pedal arm's thread would not last under normal use and abuse if it had been used often?   The hole between the seat post and the back wheel on the frame is to hold the pedal but it is missing a grommet or something.   That is so it can go into its carry bag which I don't have. 

The pedal drops into the storage hole but it is not locked in place.  The pedal would squeeze between the mudguard and the seat post but as the bike is now is a loose fit.

 

In conclusion,  

Everything seems to have been done using all the bicycle design rules to make the bicycle stable and least difficult to ride, despite its light and flimsy.  That is, it is not as bad as expected, but the bike gives a reasonable low-speed ride.  I am sure that the bicycle would be bent by hitting a pothole and the cyclist injured that is the risk with using such a bike, but in mitigation that is obvious.  Folding bicycles are not suitable for learning to ride a bike.

The bike is fiddly to fold and unfold.  It helps to measure the saddle height against myself, so I can pull it out to about the right height.  The bike is okay without lowering the seat on a bus.

More modern Bickerton folding bicycles are heavier at 13 kg, a little lighter than my Lenton Sports and heavier than my Peugeot Course sports bike.  Brompton now claims to offer the lightest folding bike at about 8 kg.  Both are British-made bikes. 

 

The Bickerton on the train was hard work lugging and trying to roll the bike to the rail replacement bus folded.  It has been recommanded that a bag with a shoulder strap helps or small wheels fitted to the back of the rack helps.  There is no comfortable way of carrying the bike up stairs the balance is in the wrong place if I hold the bike unfolded by the saddle tube below the clamp where it is not greased.

A lovely, still, sunny day at the end of September, so I put the bike on the train and visited the seaside. 

The cycle route along is flat between Hastings Old Town and West St Leonard's, seafront is okay until the hill to Ore and the hills behind to Bexhill-on-sea.  The bike drew many friendly comments as well as that it is dangerous, which it is if I hit a pothole and the bike collapses under me.  Lots of stops at lovely cafes like these and a bit of shopping, which is placed to not overhang the front of the rack. 

This is just the sort of outing the little bike is well suited to, but my full size sports bikes cope with hills and potholes better when visiting Ore or Bexhill.  They are light enough to put an off-peak train.

Android apps;

• 

  Caynax rout plotter app. with graphical statistics
  

  Google Maps is clearly readable but the bicycle and walking routes given are regular roads which can be bad, such as Southborough and High Brooms to Tonbridge the only route offered is via the A26.  This app will give verbal instructions until you get near your destination when it stops.  It tells you when to get off the train but tells you there are two stops to go when there is one stop.
  
• Movit gives good bicycle routes the A21 cycle path is offered instead of the A26 road.  But the screen is cluttered.  It Dings three times before a train stops you need to get off, the last being a double ding.  This App. grow too large to remain installed on my Doro smartphone.
  
• Both apps. Can show the train stops that the train is not going to stop at and may not show the right connections? 
• Both Apps will find a route and may adjust that route if you detour, but they must be started with an internet connection such as Wi-Fi.
• Any app. you might be able to select an alternative route with Google Maps use a bicycle route map (paper or one of the cycle route websites), select cycle or walk now, and place as many stop points on your route to steer it towards suggesting a fit with your rough plan.  Other apps you can use their website to navigate and pull the route the way you want to go then use your creation on a smartphone.
• Caynax is a good tracker with a good automatic pause.  ITO Pedometer,  is simple, reliable and automatic for walking.  Nix games Speedometer, is good.   See this blog. 

The Doro 8030 "smartphone" I use is not very smart, but the camera is okay.  Android 5 does not support some of the good cycling apps Stava and Rides With GPS any more.

For more bicycles and maintenance please look at my other blog links on the right-hand margin of this blog such as; pandemic-and-cycling-going-forward

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1955 Raleigh step-thru bicycle.

Change; 24-10-2024, 17-08-2024

Purchased in May 2024, a low-geared, four-speed Dynohub traditional bicycle.  The bike would not have had a Raleigh forever guarantee.   Later, Raleigh merged with Tube Investments in 1960 to 2012, but their bikes continued to be nice bikes to ride.  The bobbly handlebar grips are nice, and I am told they are original 1950s grips and the Dunlop tyres, which have metal caps on the valves and the brake rubbers look original as well? 

It is a heavy bike 17 or 18kg (I am not sure of my gauge) but comfortable, slow and nice to ride traditional steel bicycle.  With a bell which has a heavy brass resonating cap, a Terry saddle (was made by Raleigh they also used the brand Brooks) and a basket which I have treated with linseed oil.  Carrying any weight in the basket makes the bike a bit unstable, so you will need a little more speed.  The bike would handle better without the basket, but it is a very classical bicycle with it.

Although the frame is not high enough performance to feel the differences between Normal gear and other speeds or possibly difference between modern greased bearings and the thin oiled bearings it has, you can just discern the difference between the hub dynamo lights on and off.  They consume 2W, including about 10% losses in the generator due mostly to winding resistance.  Sturmey-Archer claimed there was no noticeable difference, but there is a just discernable difference.

Steering lock and a key.  The tyre tube valves are the old-fashioned Dunlop type, in which the valve can be removed but take care there are two sizes of valve, one is slightly too big but those fitted are the larger size type.  The hole for the valve in the rim is also slightly smaller, but modern Presta valve tubes also fit, but a car type called a Schrader valve will be too fat. 

The Frame Number is 590491 T, and the variable speed hub is dated 50 1 (January 1955).  From Sheldon Brown's website, the frame number is consistent with manufacture early in the period 1954 and 1955.

The bike's frame is very like the 1975 Hercules that I ran for a while, but that bike did not have a fully enclosed chain case.  It is probably the same frame.  This bike needs to be turned over and tilted to empty rainwater out of the chain case, I did not know that that was an issue until I took the bike home.  It is a shorter wheelbase bicycle than the Lenton sport, you can cycle at a lower speed, and it is not so exceptionally comfortable as a Reynolds 531 steel touring or sports frame bikes of that time.  You also won't notice differences between the efficiency of the gears such as between N and other speeds or that it is an all-oil, rather than a grease transmission lubrication bike.

 

I have not removed the rear wheel and the chain-case, it looks fiddly.  The three inspection covers slide out easily and the chain wheel cover, pops out with the blade of a thin screwdriver.  It is very clean inside, but for rust on the section of chain that had laid in rain water inside the chain-case.  I put back together with a smear of grease in the groves.  There is a cover with two screws for wheel removal, but I have not investigated how to do that.  The pedal arm rubbed the casing, which I have resolved by laying the bike down, putting some weight on the high side of the casing.  Here are some YouTube videos explaining a few things with this type of chain case;

Install a chain

Resolving noisy Chain case

Access to the chain

Bike restoration including the chain case

 

 

The above indicator rod is in Normal and Low gear positions respectively use ether for adjusting the cable.  Bottom gear is a hard pull on the selector, like all FG or FW variable speed hubs.  DynoHub is FG 55-1, (January 1955) it differs from the FW on my Lenton Sport in that it is, chrome-plated pressed steel and all four speeds are easy to select, that it is not worn.  That is, it is not so heavily sprung on the Bottom gear.  The basket is dry and crumbling it absorbed a lot of linseed oil which I brushed on it.

The lights worked anyway, but I have corrected the wiring and the switch now includes the rear light properly.  Surprisingly the generator return path was through the bike frame, and it worked, so the brake cables may have been connecting the return path? 

The switch on the underside of the front lamp offers;  

Dynamo - Off - Battery.

Front Lamp clamp provides power return connections to;

• Battery unit (not fitted), 
• Rear Lamp mounting bolt, 
• Dynamo - terminal.
  

And Front Lamp Live connections are inside the lamp go too;

• Battery Unit, (either outer connection)
  
• Rear light live, (must be to the centre connection)
  
• Dynamo - other terminal. (the other outer connection)
  

There was a frame return connection wire, but I have replaced it with a longer return wire to the front lamp clamp.  Nothing in the circuit will cause electrical interference, for example, the Dynohub is really an AC generator that has no brushes unlike a dynamo to cause interference, so no frame connection is required for screening.  Connections may be made to the bicycle frame, consequently fitting the lights. 

Two 6V lamp currents in parallel should add up to 280 to 300mA, therefore the lamps are 40mA rear and 240mA front.  These lights do not illuminate the road ahead much but ensure you are seen when you are moving.  I also use modern lights with batteries, so there is light when the bicycle is not moving, and I have blog pages on dynohub lighting strategies with battery charging, but these projects are not all fully developed see below.

Using the bicycle frame to carry power is not a reliable method for connecting one of the two power wires.  In this case, it is slightly better to have just one rather than many connections to the frame in order to minimise bicycle frame corrosion.  This advice contradicts good practice for electrical interference avoidance and general Earthing strategies within equipment and buildings. 

If one bulb fails, the other bulb is likely to be driven over the current and fail.  It is therefore useful to turn the lights off if one bulb fails.

The crank is oil-lubricated with a spring-loaded capped filler tucked out of the way or can be greased.  Everything else in the transmission should be thin oil lubricated, but thin engine oil is suitable and won't harm the gear hub.  There is also an oiler port for the chain on top of the chain case, which you unscrew.

The paint and the decorations are in very good order, and I think the rims are steel, so the braking is quite good.  But unlike earlier bicycles the pedal arms, brake callipers and neither wheel hubs are not stainless steel, but the rims are good steel or stainless steel.  The brake adjusters are the modern, plainer style typical of that era of post-war bicycles. 

 

 

  

The brake shoes are the old type made until the 1960s, in which you could slide in a new rubber rather than need to replace the whole shoe.  They used to be difficult to replace because they could rust or stick.

But the brake cables are the old type with soldered nipples on each end.

Other Bicycle Blogs.

Electronics design project - Bicycle Dynamo maximum power and battery charging manager

Pandemic cycling and bicycle selection, going forward

Bicycle Dynohub maintenance

1946 Lenton Sports bicycle

 

Conclusion

The Raleigh bike is lovely and is nicer to ride than many modern bikes, but being a bit newer than my Lenton Sport has plainer brake adjusters.  The spokes are all galvanised steel, both front and back.  But it is not a sport or touring frame, so you don't have the greater speed and comfort of those bikes made at that time.  The frame is stiffer for slower riding and carrying weight on a rack and panniers if fitted.  The brakes are quite good for their time because they are cable and the caliper operates on the sides of stainless steel rims.

1997 Universal, La Riveria, pictured left, is a faster, light to pedal, comfortable, modern cheap British-made bike.  It weighs the same and can carry a lot of weight high on the rack and remain stable.  Plus, despite the surface rust it had been looked after.  I have used the bike for the past 5 years, you won't be able to crawl slowly up hill unlike the Raleigh.  Typically, of bicycles and particularly chromed rim braking, it stopping in the rain is poor.  The Raleigh's stainless steel rims means that it does stop in the rain in an eventually sort of way though.

Only my Lenton sports would be fine riding all day on, the modern Peugeot course sports, or these town bikes are not comfortable or light enough to pedal for that.

Computers and Home computer archive

Created; 08/10/2023, Changed; 24/10/2023 - 23/10/2023

My first computer was a home computer, one of the best of its time the Acorn Atom, which I purchased second-hand in about 1979.  This ran BASIC and had an assembler plus access to system features.  All the computers I have run at home have been second-hand privately purchased but for one second-hand that I purchased from a computer shop.  The first computer I ran with an operating system ran CP/M and was an Epson QX-10, after that, I have been running PCs with DOS, Linux and also Android.  My related pages; Windows to Linux - operating systems

My electronics projects at home were unplanned do a bit of design or copy a bit then do a bit more.  With veroboard design, this is a good strategy in laying out a design you do the most important first, the power supply decoupling, and sensitive signals.  My first projects at work were electronics but later it was necessary to select and design with microcontrollers.  I started to use worst-case design methods and other things I was learning at technical college in my design work. 

Physicists and worst-case design methods - sometimes people don't understand the imprecise nature of real-world, materials and people.  They understand the words but have no feel for the imprecise way materials, technicians and engineers need to understand to work.

Spock, pictured, does not appear to understand tolerances and the imprecise nature of the universe, so he compensates by calculating to a greater accuracy than is required.  A company I worked for made optical parts to a greater accuracy than was required adding cost although the final trimming of optical assemblies could be left centred without adjustment.  Things have changed electronic components and most things, are made to a high accuracy in order to assemble devices that need little or no further adjustment, the parts have been trimmed before they were mounted in their package or discarded if they did not meet all specification points or does not work.  Temperament types figure in misunderstanding.

Embedded microcontroller;

At work, I developed software and electronics for an Intel i8748 microcontroller, which had 1K x 8 EPROM, 64 bytes of RAM and about 240 instructions.  The development system was Prompt 48 which required the programmer to write down your instructions on a pad of blank paper tables and translate the instructions to hexadecimal code instruction and operator.  The program was typed in and programmed using a hexadecimal keypad with seven-segment displays.  The manufacturers provided a lot of training books and crib cards, showing programmes to carry out many things such as multiply or divide for example.  The machine cycle was 2.5 uS with a 3.6 MHz crystal and consumed about 0.5 W.

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/intel-prompt-48-microcomputer-1823587674

https://beomicro.wordpress.com/intel-8048/

At this time it was a big cost in time and money to switch microprocessors.  i8048/8748 (1976) was not compatible with i8051 although Intel said it was.  On the other hand, the Motorola MC6800 code was compatible with newer of there 8-bit microcontrollers and microprocessors MC6801 (1978), and MC6811 until about 1988 with the introduction of the MC68HC12.  By about 1985 people had in any case moved their code to a computer such as a PC and were using cross-assemblers running on CP/M or DOS, so older software could be changed with less effort and run on another microcontroller from the same manufacturer but requiring less, but still a lot of effort.  Towards the end of this part's life, a version i8749 with 2K EPROM became available, it had been superseded by i8051/i8751 and many other manufacturers' products.  i8749 was not supported by the Prompt 48 but in any case, debugging and an emulator were not required only an adaptor for the programmer was required.  Switching to another manufacturer meant learning new embedded peripherals which is also a lot of work.  By the end of the 1980s people were beginning to use C-cross-compilers and the microprocessor instruction set was not an issue Switching to another manufacturer was not such an issue any more but for the differences in the peripherals were and are a big issue.  PC-lint was being used to check the programming which operates like a grammar checker for C source program code. 

The program to carry out one of four or five scale conversions could have used a look-up table with straight-line approximation between points.  But it used integer arithmetic; = A + B.x + C.x² + D.x³ + F.x⁴ + G.x⁵ polynomial calculation though complicated was simplified by making the multiplier (B, C etc) a divisor;  = A + A.x/b + A.x.x/(b.c) + A.x.x.x/(b.c.d) + …..  It also did temperature compensation by calculation of B and C terms from temperature and the measurement reading using another two 5-term polynomials.  It was possible that the shortcuts would have made some scale conversions not possible but no such problem arose during the instrument's 25-year production run, because the number range necessary to maintain precision using single precision integer arithmetic had been worked through in the design stage. 

I struggled with reading when I was 20 so despite the very good programming tutorials and examples provided by the manufacturers I only got the gist of them and then re-invented but with shortcuts to save the microcontroller's memory.  I only started learning programming at college after I had started the project.  In this way, the polarimeter project which my manager started off in a good direction for me ended up as a very fast rough answer that improved and gave a pleasant and usually quicker more accurate response probably than any other polarimeter of its time. 

Programming; The MC6801 could be purchased with LILbug debug monitor.  Which I used to start developing the next project.  The construction was on veroboard including SRAM and an EPROM.  The completed range of new instruments used HD6301 microcontrollers until these became obsolete in the 2000s.  Development used an EPROM programmer, cross assembler and an Embedded BASIC, it was made and sold by a university tutor, who supported it well fixing many things.  This method of developing projects did not change much with the switch to HC12 or PowerPC other than to use the debugging interface built into these microcontrollers to program the flash ROM.  Cosmic C compiler for MC6812 was the best quality, robust tool I ever used and the French company who made that range of compiler and user interfaces were and are proud of their products.

Avoiding the transition to microcontroller (now called embedded microcontroller)

There were a lot of ICs and LSI (large-scale integration) that allowed you to continue developing electronics solutions without using a microcontroller and the big hurdle of a lot more software development for a lower cost and often better solution.  Analogue electronics were improved and were very good by 1980.  For example the Ferranti digital panel meter ZN450? did not require the expensive and large capacitors that other makers required because it used delete-sigma A/D conversion, but the development of this part was not completed.  FMMT459, high voltage, low power, the transistor used in CRT type oscilloscopes and other high voltage electrostatic driven beam devices.   The Raytheon RC4200 multiplier/divider IC was particularly good and resulted in a less compromised solution than some more expensive parts.  

Analog to Digital converters with display drivers.  Decimal counters with display drivers made by Intersil.  Better operational amplifiers and multipliers for analogue calculation rather than using software.  I used these in my earlier development work to apply some approximate scale conversion in what turned out to be a turning point instrument completion for the company's future.  The RFM80, a refractometer of 1980, was very well regarded in its time.  The drawback with parts this age was that their accuracy was usually only specified at room temperature although they also had an operating temperature range but often it was not that wide.  Now parts are specified for minimum production life, a much better temperature range with quoted performance and a vastly lower defect rate. 

Mainframe computer

Traditionally mainframe computers run micro-instructions.  An emulator or simulator is loaded to provide a nicer computer instruction set to program with each instruction being carried out using several micro-instructions. 

Ferranti made one of the first electronic computers and also made mainframe computers.  They also made 16-bit radiation-hardened and wide operating temperature range microprocessors for space and the military, the F100-L in the 1970s and 1980s.

Mainframe computers used to use ECL logic (Emitter Coupled Logic) specifically called Bit-Slice parts, which was and still is fast. 

PCs, Mini and Mainframe computers require a small ROM containing the bootstrap loader to load program from a floppy disk, tape or disk.  But the ROM also included a Monitor program, that gave some debugging such as to set break-points, load, save, edit and examine memory features.  I've used SWTbug at college. 

Mainframe computer design influenced microprocessor design by varying degrees;

Many of the earlier microprocessors evidently ran micro-instructions internally but were programmed in comprehensive instruction sets similar to how a mainframe computer would be used.  By comparison, MC6800 ran a comprehensive instruction set implemented in hardware, this is how all microprocessors operate now.  The PIC is probably the only microcontroller that runs micro-instructions and is programmed in micro-instruction by the end user these microcontrollers are only used to do very little such as set up timers,  Analog-to-Digital converters and Digital-to-Analog converters and simple input and output port pins on-chip, they are cheap parts. 

The most influential mini-computer was made by Digital the PDP-11 of 1970

The significant change point that brought about mass home computer ownership was probably when EPROM became available cheaply; 

EPROM HN482764G is generically known as 2708 to 27512 it only requires a 5V power supply.  1K x 8 bits to 64K x 8 bits with a higher voltage (12V to 21V depending on the part) is required for Vpp when programming the device.  NM2708 was new in about 1977 and cost £70-£100 each, but the price quickly dropped.

EPROM type i1702 Intel, MM5203 to MM5204 National Semiconductors required -12V +5V power supplies plus Vpp -47V or -50V.  MM5204, which had an increased capacity of 512 x 8 bits, was new in about 1976 and did not have 4-bit bus support. 

Alternatively, mask ROM could be custom-made - I believe these became viable if the batch quantity was at least 2,000 in the 1970s.  Manufactures of fusible link Programmable Read Only Memory (PROM) gave users circuit and constructional details on how to make a programmer using LEDs, thumb-wheel switches, TTL logic, etc to build on veroboard.  Be careful though, one mistake, and you have to discard an expensive part.  At this time fusible-link PROM was small, probably 32 bytes to 1K bytes and expensive in the later 1970s?

EPROM HN482764G

2764 8K byte EPROMs (pictured) were used in a considerable number of computers from the late 1970s. 

Once this size EPROM became available cheaply the home computer quickly became very popular.

By comparison, The Zilog and Intel microprocessors in the 1970s-80s may have also run micro-instructions internally to provide the comprehensive instruction set a chip user programmer would use.  Some alternatives to these microprocessors such as i8751/i8051 were made by other companies that ran comprehensive instructions directly without requiring many cycles but using hardware functions in the same way that the MC6800 Motorola and R6502 Rockwell did then and probably all microprocessors do now.  

The MC6800 may have started as a hybrid IC containing several chips before it was released commercially.  The two-phase clock input had to be correct and the MC6801 was much easier to use the embedded version.  The HD6301 Hitachi was a much lower power and faster CMOS version used in battery-operated computers and dot-matrix printers and sold in very high volumes for 1 to 2 decades.

Picture

Hitachi's HD6301 was faster than MC6801 generally, instruction took one clock cycle less to perform.  These microcontrollers and other Hitachi microcontrollers in printers and consumer products during the 1980s and 90s.  Whereas Motorola was used in the automotive industry mostly very prominently in the 1990s.  The CMOS HD63701?? with EPROM integrated pictured was withdrawn because the product did not comply with a cross-license agreement between Motorola and Hitachi so Hitachi developed the H4, H8 and H16 products instead and the HD63000 also never became available.  Motorola subsequently introduced pipe-lining architecture to improve the speed of their microcontrollers.

It was much superior to the late1970s i8748, which had 1K byte EPROM, 64 bytes of RAM and 256 address range but could access up to 4K bytes of memory using paging.  These embedded microcontrollers had mask ROM variants i8048. The MC6801 and HD6301 could alternatively run from an external ROM.  They all had ports and timers and were suitable for high-volume production.  The EPROM variants were suitable for low-volume manufacturers and prototype software development.  Compared to modern embedded microcontrollers these older parts made the bus available for programming and development.  Rare piggyback EPROM type microcontroller with the EPROM plugged into the top of the microcontroller Integrated Circuit. 

Page 18, 6 and 8 pin embedded microcontroller SC9RS08KA2.  

Note; BKGD (Debug and programming pin) can be a port or 

function output and ! RESET can be a port or function input.

The Motorola one-wire background debug interface has not been used by any other manufacturer.  Other manufacturers use interfaces that use more wires such as TI's JTAG which has 4 wires plus a reset wire and is used by other manufacturers such as IBM/Motorola's PowerPC.  The debug interface used by ST in its ARM 32 embedded microcontroller is 2 wires plus reset. 

The MC6811 and the MC68HC12 could be programmed through any one of the ports which defaulted to boot-loader or debugging.  This feature is commonly available on most embedded microcontrollers for fast production programming.  The debug interface like the one pictured is slower when programming parts with a large amount of data but would also do the job easily.  HC12 was a step back in features from the MC68HC16 which like many of Motorola's parts were more complicated, very impressive, but not so popular, that I evaluated but did not use because it was not a popular range of embedded microcontrollers.

The I2C bus developed by Philips (NXP) is widely used but there are almost equivalent copies, by comparison, the CAN bus is specified and controlled by the automotive industry and I do not think that there are near equivalent copies of it.  These are not used for programming and development but for communication between ICs on the same circuit board or within a car respectively.

By the 1990s embedded microcontrollers such as MC68HC12 included on-chip Flash one-wire  programming and debug interface.  These microcontrollers require compact therefore fast operating programs.  Now, 9HCS12 is made by NXP in Europe instead of Motorola in the USA and is very well optimised for 8 and 16-bit operations, these are flexible powerful microcontrollers.   This has a one-wire wire background debug plus a simple fast bootloader that monitors all serial communications and ports and then programs the flash if it has not already been programmed. 

The low-cost 8-bit variant HC908 (HC08) has 8 pins or more and can be found in very cheap products such as a computer mouse.  Software development Cosmic HC08 and HCS08 Products (cosmicsoftware.com).  The cheapest most cut-down variant that remains available RS08 datasheet page above is a subset the of MC6800 core approximately but with the background debug interface and is available with as few as 6 pins note that even the control and debug/programming pins!RESET (or alternative input function) and BDGM (or alternative output function) can be used as ports in a limited way.

In traditional programming with few or no libraries and tools to help there is very little need for debugging, (setting breakpoints and monitoring variables) but just programming.  The only time where these things are more important is initially before you have developed much code and therefore you can arrange hardware implementation to not use the two pins until late in development and for the simplest things so that you keep the option to debug for as long as practical.  In any case, I have and would always avoid sharing debugging pins with other functions.  There was a bug in one compiler I was using and the debug feature was useful for identifying it, Cosmic then rapidly fixed their compiler and the problem was resolved.

STM ARM based; STM32F072, Nucleo-64 

TI; MPS430, EXP430FR2433 

NXP ARM based; MKV11Z128VLF7, FRDM-KV11Z. 

In each case, these evaluation boards include the debug and programming circuits at the top of the PCBs.  They are connected and powered via a USB cable.  The microcontroller is a 32-bit bit with FLASH ROM and RAM on-chip, ports, and programming/debug interface but no bus I/O.  Rarely does an application require a 32-bit microcontroller but these parts also have more sophisticated ports, timers etc. 8 or 16-bit microcontroller would be adequate and more efficient but there is a considerable range of variants without adding more. 

Manufacturers of the microcontroller provide software tools, debugging interface and software libraries.  In the case of ARM core processors, there is one CAD tool used for writing programs which uses the code provided by the parts manufacturer.  This does not mean you can swap between manufacturers or swap between parts easily but you can now do it.  Lauterbach makes these tools for ARM.  The Texas Instruments evaluation board pictured is not an ARM core microcontroller so you need a completely different set of CAD tools for it.

Sinclair had very exciting products that always turned out to be a  disappointment.  Scientific calculator that gave the wrong answer if it had taken too long to compute a log or a trig function the manual warned of and did occur often.  A watch made with special black plastic called Black Watch.  Kits included; a matchbox-size radio,  radio and an amplifier, using pulse width modulation speaker drive (I think).  An advanced computer with an MC68008 processor and solid-state Micro-drives turned out to be a tape loop.  A portable flat-screen TV may have been okay, but I do not know about the flat-screen oscilloscope?  Still, the audacity of this company deserved an award which the Queen duly gave the owner. 

The best home computer

Reduced Instruction Set Microprocessors (RISC) are very common and a lot is claimed but they may be, in some cases, just old intellectual property dressed up.  The ARM 7 instruction set runs at half the speed of a Motorola M-core for the same clock speed but can be switched to run as fast but with more memory use than the M-core.  ARM is sold as a very cheap commodity piece of intellectual property whereas Motorola developed the most leading edge parts.  The last version of the BBC micro had an impressively fast ARM microprocessor.  The ARM microprocessor is now used very widely even Motorola (now NXP) make microprocessors using the ARM core under license.  But like Motorola make PowerPC under licence from IBM (R6000 core) I would say it is better to use one of the company's own propriety processors Motorola understated what they do and they have very satisfied users consequently.

The MOSTEC or Rockwell R6502 processor-based BBC micro was faster than the i8086-based first IBM PC's despite on paper seeming to be slow.  Both were Comprehensive Instruction Set microprocessors (CISC).  Many electronic designers got caught out by spec. points v reality.  The problem is that you never really know until you have invested heavily in a chosen microprocessor development then you are stuck with it.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology

The speed and size of the program being run if it is in assembler (machine code) or optimized compiled high-level language can be very small and fast this is how the Acorn Atom with its built-in assembler and highly efficient BBC Basic programming language got its justly deserved excellent reputation for.  But Basic is an interpreted language meaning it is written in text interpreted character by character at the time of running that program.  The trick with the Acorn Atom and BBC was to convert the textual words to short tokens two bytes in size that are therefore much quicker to interpret than longer full English language spelt-out words.  The BBC micro was faster still and this was achieved by placing line length code at the beginning of each program line so that the interpreter can calculate line lengths and skip along quickly to the required line.  There are a lot of scripting languages that work by interpreting text such as; Submit, Batch, Perl, Java, and HTML.  The program running may not be aware of the precise details of the computer it is running on but instead, it could be running on a standard virtual machine environment created for it such as; Pascal and p-code, Java to run JavaScript or basic interpreter.  The implication of this is that the program does not need to be rewritten for every possibility but on the other hand the machine is running a program that is, in turn, running on another program and perhaps runs a third program that interprets text list-based tasks this of cause slows the computer and makes the code very large.  It is therefore possible to create a vastly powerful and wide range of applications with a vast number of software writers each adhering to a set of rules, way beyond the capability of one person but the coding is necessarily not so efficient.  

National Semiconductors used to make a microprocessor that appeared to run very primitive micro-instructions in the 1970s and early 1980s.  One variant included a BASIC interpreter and was very slow but quite flexible DMA.  INS8060 and INS8070 SC/MP,  I do not know but this may still continue to be modified made but now known as PIC?  SC/MP (scamp) was one of the first microcontrollers to come into the country from the USA in 1976 and the evaluation kit was built into a good-sized suitcase.  Intel also made a version of i8051 but with a BASIC interpreter programmed into the ROM.

An anecdote is that Motorola's MC6800, and some of the UK's makers like Plessy, were making microprocessors for the military before 1970. 

Now, Computers are considerably faster, but the software is much slowed by being written in scripting languages, run time systems and elaborate graphics plus some of the operating systems such as Windows grow in an untidy way with patches added.