Personal
The less official side: retro computing, some photos and videos, music, and a few pages for family and friends. What I build in my spare time is on the hardware projects and software projects pages.
Writing
- My blog, with occasional entries from 2008 to 2025.
- 25 Years of Home Computing - my road to computers, from the Busch Microtronic to the PC (December 2008).
- The Making of LambdaSpeak - how my speech synthesizer for the Amstrad CPC came about (June 2022).
- About these pages - a short history of this homepage and the Common Lisp macros that generate it.
Retro Computing
- The Busch Microtronic: build log of my Microtronic emulators, 2016 - 2026, and 35 Jahre Busch Microtronic - eine Hommage (in German, 2016).
- My vintage computer collection - picture gallery, April 2023.
- My old collection of vintage home computers in Hamburg, photographed in the summer of 2008. Most of it has since been donated to the computer museum of the University of Hamburg (Prof. Oberquelle); a few machines came with me to the US, and some are still in my storage room in Hamburg.
- My Symbolics 3645 Lisp Machine - picture gallery. I once owned a Symbolics 3645, from 1999 to 2003! Sadly, the machine is no longer with me.
- Matthias Uphoff's Software Experiment (2002), and why I am "hosting" it. There is also a DSK file containing the programs.
Photos and Videos
- Sun and moon: Partial solar eclipse, 23 October 2014 and the moon through my Bresser telescope, Hamburg, January 2010.
- Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia. I took this picture when I attended my first conference, VL '98, in Nova Scotia, Canada.
- Hannah the dog - videos.
Teaching
- Intro to the Raspberry Pi and the Internet of Things - a class I taught in spring 2018, with all slides and programs.
- Microprofessor video tutorials - Z80 machine code and assembler, Tiny BASIC, BASIC and FORTH on the 1981 Microprofessor MPF-1B and MPF-1P (2022).
Strange Things - A Computer Generation Is Growing Up (1987)
In the summer of 1987, at sixteen, I was interviewed by a journalist! My French teacher had put me in touch with a journalist friend of hers, Kirsten Lehmkuhl, who wrote for the Friedrich Reinecke Verlag in Hamburg - a publisher of press services for readers abroad. Her article was meant for a magazine in Israel - in Hebrew, I suppose - about current affairs in Germany; a mirror of the young West German society, I guess, forty years after the war. Its title: "Faszinierende Elektronik - Eine Computergeneration wächst heran" (Fascinating Electronics - A Computer Generation Is Growing Up).
I am the "Michael, a sixteen-year-old pupil from Hamburg" in it, whose desk has been completely taken over by screen, keyboard, printer and heaps of floppy disks, with computer magazines all over the floor and computer graphics on the walls - "King Computer rules the room". "That the machine does what I want - that is what fascinates me so much", I said, and "it is not uncanny to me at all; I know the principle behind it." My newest program, which shows mathematical functions as colourful graphics - "mathematics gains shape and colour" - was Colfunkt, which I had sold to the CPC International; and the computer with more memory and more speed that I was saving the money for was the Amiga, which I got that December.
The publication of the magazine's "computer issue" was postponed, and in June 1988 Kirsten Lehmkuhl sent me a note: "Finally, the magazine for Israel is printed". I have never seen the printed magazine, though, and I have not been able to find out its name, or find the Hebrew version of the article. If you know more, please let me know!
My Father
My father, Rudolf Wessel (26 December 1929 - 15 October 2023), from Malchin in Mecklenburg, was a passionate collector. For seventy years he collected children's books from three centuries: in the last days of the Second World War, the small book collection of the then 15-year-old burned - "Robinson Crusoe" and some fairy tale books of the Brothers Grimm. After moving to Hamburg, he found the same books again at an antiquarian bookseller. Later he returned to Malchin and set up a children's book museum in the centre of the town. He also collected tin toys. The NDR programme Nordtour portrayed him twice: the children's book collector from Malchin (2015) and the tin toy collector from Malchin (2021). Both are in my YouTube playlist Rudolf Wessel aus Malchin.
Family and Friends (Password Required)
- Family pictures: Holiday 2011 - Germany 2012 - Palo Alto 2023 - Fotobuch Margrit (2018).
- Selfmade music - my own recordings and those of friends.
- My university homepage, 1999 - 2004 - the complete original, with the Symbolics pages, a California trip and the band pictures.
Site Stats
- Web statistics - the public report, with visitor addresses anonymised.
- Web statistics, full detail (password required).
- Most requested pages and files, visiting sites, and where visitors come from - the plain lists (password required).
Elsewhere on the Web
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Demonstrations of nearly all of my hardware and software projects - the retro computer expansions, the Microtronic emulators, the old and new programs, and my Vintage Computer Festival tables.
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Source code, schematics, PCB designs, firmware and documentation of my projects - as lambdamikel on Github.
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Build logs and project pages of the hardware projects, including some that have no repository.
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