Several months ago, while casually browsing the web from link to link, I ended up on the Veronica project page. I've played with computers for some years now, but never thought I'd ever be able to actually make one. That is, until I read Quinn's posts. Granted, she uses a 6502 instead of a 8088, but that can't be that different, can it ?

So I started to think about it, and after having read a lot of documentation and countless web pages, I was finaly confident that I could do... Well, that I could do something that could be called a computer without stretching the definition too much. With that in mind, I went to Ebay and ordered components from a dozen different sellers. The majority of them has now arrived but I'm still waiting for a few parcels to show up.

These days, whenever I've got some free time, I go back to my breadboard, or cut and strip some left over twisted-pair network cable, and try to add another element to the project. It is fairly clear in my mind where I'm heading to, and the steps I need to make to get there are quite well defined. We'll see how it turns out! In any case, that will be a nice opportunity to learn new things (new for me at least, as some of them were already pretty much obsolete 10 years ago or more).

As I forsee it, most of my design will be compatible with the original IBM PC, except for the graphics card, if I ever get that far. I don't rule out the possibility that an off-the-shelf VGA adapter could be plugged in an ISA slot, though.

The next part will be about the components I (intend to) use in this project.