About the DoPECC Site

This site is a private effort to share an interest in early electronic technology and in the design and construction standards of that era.

The machines and the related technical data are both becoming harder to find and many examples are no doubt being lost. The internet provides a means to store and then share this information across a global audience.

The site is also intended to be a conduit for information and a place where information may be deposited and shared by those who may have items that may be of interest to collectors everywhere.

Information that is particularly sought includes:

  • Circuit Diagrams and Technical Manuals for any machines on this site
    • Sharp Hayakawa circuits for transistor and early IC machines are particularly wanted
  • Information about Ai Electronics ABC 24 and ABC 26 Computers
    • Any and all original software
    • Any and all circuits and technical manuals
  • Monrobot XI computer hardware, complete or partial, alive or dead.

Contact DoPECC

New information, comments, stories and anything else of interest may be sent to harry at dopecc dot net

Construction of this Site

This site began as hand-coded HTML which was a useful learning experience. As the site grew this architecture became unmaintainable and the site did not recieve much attention for a time. It was clear that the site would have to be ported to a new architecture, but the result would have to be robust, long-lived and require little structural maintenance. The common website/blogging platforms were unattractive for reasons including:

  • Lock-in to a specific product
  • Content authoring into a proprietary format that cannot easily be moved
  • Structural maintainance requirement, many of these platforms are active hacking targets

Static Site Generators finally provided a solution. Static site architectures permit:

  • Full ownership and control of all content
  • Authoring in portable generic Markdown format
  • No structural maintenance, no maintenance of foreign code such as plugins
  • Smallest attack surface
Hugo: DoPECC’s chosen static site generator

Hugo has been an excellent choice. The small, fast Hugo executable is downloaded and installed on your presonal machine. This executable parses the Markdown content, generates a directory tree of HTML and provides a webserver for live editing and review as you write. The development environment is completely self-contained, interactive and can be used offline. When you are happy with a set of updates and how they render, the HTML directory is generated and the diffs are uploaded to your hosting provider. There are no plugins to maintain, no server code to maintain and the attack surface is minimal. All your time can be spent on the site content.

There was a moderate learning curve but the excellent Hugo community is generous with support. Hugo versions after mid-2018 provide excellent functionality in an easy and interactive content creation environment. For sites such as this, Hugo is strongly recommended.