What and Who Is LoadAccumulator

I am Bob Alexander. I am a software engineer and a hobbyist maker. I design electronic circuits, I do woodworking, photography, animation, and more.

I run a few websites:

  • PCBShopper.com is a price comparison site for professional and hobbyist electronic engineers. After an EE designs a circuit, he can come to PCBShopper.com, enter the specs, and see prices and delivery times from dozens of different printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturers.
  • Vectrex32.com is where I sell 32 bit upgrades to the Vectrex, a 1982 game console that used a built-in vector graphics display. There’s still a community of people writing new games for the Vectrex in 6809 assembly language. The Vectrex32 allows you to write Vectrex games in interactive, interpreted BASIC.
  • ByteCovers.com is where I sell prints of photographic re-creations of Byte magazine covers. In the 1970s and 1980s, Byte was the leading magazine devoted to microcomputers. Every month, it had a beautiful, surreal painting by Robert Tinney on the cover. Those paintings would be imaginative mash-ups of computers with something else. I have embarked on an art project to re-create those scenes photographically. Mr. Tinney has given me permission to sell those prints.
  • GalacticStudios.org is where I showcase the things I make in my various hobby activities. The grandiose name is one I used as a teenager when I was making home movies with a super 8 camera.

And what, you might ask, is the origin of “Load Accumulator”? Eight bit microprocessors in the 1970s and 1980s (and minicomputers from an earlier era) had a special memory location built into them called an accumulator. This was the only memory location those early computers could do calculations with. The process was to load a value into the accumulator (frequently using an instruction called “Load Accumulator”), and then add or subtract other values from the value in the accumulator.

Since I have fond memories of my first computer (a Southwest Technical Products Corp. 6809), I wanted a domain name that hearkened back to those days.