I’ve held onto the hard copy of my Electrical Engineering Thesis for around 25 years. It recently suffered water damage so I decided it was time to immortalise it on the world wide web.

I say ‘world wide web’ in preference to modern terminology such as ’net’, ‘web’ etc. in homage to the title of the thesis:

A TOASTER WITH A WORLD WIDE WEB INTERFACE.

Here is a photo of the ‘completed’ project:

and a photo of the electronics board:

I say ‘completed’ as I suffered a major setback about 6 weeks before the due date when I fried the ethernet controller chip. The lead time was over 3 months and so I set myself on a new journey of implementing network connectivity over SLIP.

This ate into my development time and consequently I only managed to get to the point where I had a multi-tasking OS running two processes: one outputting ‘S’ and one outputting ‘O’ over serial. Get it…? SOS…

Still, designing and building a compute board to interface with the Hitachi SH1 processor and porting XINU to run on it was not easy - and I’m still proud of my achievement to this day.

Click on the cover for the full thesis:

And click on the floppy for the code: