At the Miðeind office we harbor a great treasure: a Commodore CBM 8032 computer, dating from around 1981. The computer has 32 kilobytes of memory (yes, kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes) and a MOSTEK 6502 processor, which handles 8 bits at a time at a clock speed of 1 MHz.

Vilhjálmur, Miðeind's founder, found the computer abandoned in the basement of an office building in Reykjavík, where it had been gathering dust and grime. It wouldn't start, and it took a considerable rescue operation to get it up and running.

There were at least four reasons why Vilhjálmur was so keen to save this computer and install it in the Miðeind office:

1. It is the same type of computer on which he himself began his career as a programmer, at the age of 15. He still knows how to program it in the BASIC programming language and in 6502 machine code.

2. The computer fully supports Icelandic, displays Icelandic characters on screen and has an Icelandic keyboard with a "dead accent" key for accented letters (in other words: you first press ´ and then a to get á).

3. Vilhjálmur himself wrote, back in the day, the modifications to the computer's operating system that enable it to handle Icelandic and Icelandic characters. Those modifications were programmed in 6502 machine code and burned onto read-only memory chips (EPROM chips), which were swapped in on the computer's motherboard.

4. In view of points 1, 2 and 3, it was clear that it was the karma of the universe that brought Vilhjálmur and the computer together, and that saving it was therefore inevitable and written in the stars.

Commodore CBM 8032 computers were used in over 80 Icelandic companies in their day, for accounting, customs declarations, word processing and more. In almost every case, these were the first computers the companies ever owned and used. They were usually connected to disk drives that could store 1 MB (one megabyte) on 2 x 512 KB flat, flexible, removable diskettes (floppy disks) that were 5¼" in diameter. (Nobody ever spoke of centimetres in that context.)

To get our computer up and running, it first had to be cleaned thoroughly, inside and out. Once the cleaning was done, it was plugged in and switched on – but nothing happened.

We were at a loss, so it was time to turn to artificial intelligence (Claude Fable 5) for help with troubleshooting. With its assistance and a voltmeter, it became clear that at least the computer's voltage regulators were not working. Fortunately, it proved possible to obtain spare parts from the remarkable shop Íhlutir in Skipholt. After surgery with the help of a drill and a soldering iron, new voltage regulators were fitted and another attempt was made to switch the computer on. Remarkably enough, it sprang to life with a beep and a normal display – victory was ours!

Here you can see the screen that appears when the computer is switched on. Originally, the top line reads Commodore BASIC 4.0, but the modified Icelandic operating system overwrites that text with the advertisement Tölvuskólinn the first time a key on the keyboard is pressed. In other words, this was done under the banner of Tölvuskólinn (the Computer School) and later Tölvubúðin (the Computer Shop), where Vilhjálmur began his career as a programmer – and programming teacher.

Tölvuskólinn and Tölvubúðin imported and sold Commodore PET and CBM computers, and ran very well-attended courses for the general public on this new phenomenon – the personal computer – which even then was believed, rightly, to be set to change the world. As the news item above from 1981 shows, Tölvubúðin was committed from the outset to supporting Icelandic characters on the keyboard, screen and printer, which was by no means a given in those days.

Such support was not as easy to achieve then as it is nowadays, when fonts and operating system functionality are ‘soft’, i.e. changeable in software. Computers of that era generally had only one typeface, and it was burned permanently into read-only memory chips (read-only memory, ROM) on the machines's motherboard. The same applied to the operating system, which handles communication with the keyboard and writing text to the screen. From the manufacturer, the font and operating system were fixed in English in the hardware, and supporting other languages was very much an exception.

The image above shows the motherboard of the Commodore computer. The chip at the bottom left, in the green frame, contains the look of the Icelandic characters (the character generator). Handwritten on it is “ISL ST” – in the handwriting of Vilhjálmur Þorsteinsson, who produced the chip at the time. It is an EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory), a programmable (“burnable”) chip that could also be erased by shining ultraviolet light on it.

The chip in the red frame near the top right is labelled “BASIC 4” (also in Vilhjálmur’s handwriting). It contains the operating system extension that adds the aforementioned dead acute accent key to the keyboard, so that accented letters can be typed in the way we are familiar with (accent + a = á). The extension is programmed in 6502 machine code and intervenes in the standard keyboard routine, which reads the signals from the keyboard and converts them into characters displayed on the screen.

In other words, all new Commodore computers sold through Tölvuskólinn and Tölvubúðin were opened up when they arrived in the country, and three read-only memory chips in them were replaced in order to support Icelandic. Sometimes the original chips were not even in sockets, in which case they had to be cut off the motherboard and a socket soldered on in their place with a soldering iron.

This ambition is well worth bearing in mind nowadays, when there are examples of, for instance, ticket and receipt printers in shops and cinemas that cannot handle Icelandic characters! Surely it ought to be much easier to manage now than it was then.

Anyone interested in this 45-year-old treasure is welcome to visit us at the office to see it with their own eyes – and to practice programming in BASIC.