In this, our sixth article, we take a look at the members of the MO5 association who are working to restore our Micral N and get it up and running again!
Jean-François Del Nero : Jean-François is our chief technical engineer. Give him anything with a bit of electronics in it, and he'll fix it, get it working and... hack it. Irreparably. He's also a creative genius, the father of HxC, the floppy drive emulator that has changed the lives of thousands of people around the world, and of PaulineZe tool for scanning and archiving the contents of these diskettes. The Minitel was supposedly a dumb terminal? Challenge accepted, Jeff made a 3D demo on it, visible on Youtube. Extremely rare Squale computers? Ditto, they're all repaired and functional, and the only demo that has ever existed in the world is of his own making. I've even heard that one day he'll manage to run a DOS demo on an LCD screen, without a computer. Sisi. So we took our Micral N to Jeff to be pampered and looked after. If you could have seen his smile then 😉
Sylvain Glaize: Sylvain is our mad coder. Anything that can be programmed using instructions or a language is just another beast for Sylvain to learn and dissect. And the older and more constrained it is, the more it makes him shudder. And yet he creates some of the most modern video games in one of the world's biggest studios - it's hard to understand! He's also a fan of 8-bit microcomputers that only display a few colours, and even then only if they're equipped with Triangle keys. In fact, he has a fine collection of them, which he looks after regularly and even programmes games on! And when we told him we'd got our hands on a Micral N equipped with an Intel 8008, the world's second-largest micro-processor, he lost his legendary phlegm for a tenth of a second and let out an unusual burst of enthusiasm: we knew we'd touched his heart and piqued his interest. Now, Sylvain is calmly working on the virtual clone of the Micral N!
Yoann Le Bars: Yoann is our IT code keeper: he's the association's chief software archivist. And he knows all about code! Even as a child, he was coding shoot them ups Pascal, a language he still dreams about at night. He also loves old systems, Unix machines, things so old that the only memory teenagers have of them is hearing about them in Jurassic Park. And Jurassic Park is an ode to the power of some of his favourite machines: Silicon Graphics! So he thought he'd program a Another World just like that. No, the only thing Yoann can't do is, like the rest of us, find some free time to work on all the MO5 association's projects, including a revolutionary inventory tool. But hey, retirement is just around the corner, so let's hope for the best!
Hervé Le Bouler : Hervé is the MO5 association's man of trust, the one you can entrust with a mission with your eyes shut. Like Rambo, you can send him to any of the association's exhibitions, even 7,000 kms away in Canada, to set up a Game Story with you and return to France alone with collectables in his suitcase. As he knows a lot about old computers and reads the few books available in France on the history of French computing, we thought it would be a good idea for him to conduct interviews with the R2E engineers who are still with us, and it works! You'll soon be able to read more of his articles on the subject. He often offers to accompany other members in the car and loves computer raspberries, so what more could you ask for?
Philippe Dubois Philippe is the orchestra conductor. He's the one who called the Micral N seller with his heart pounding, thinking that this was the opportunity of a lifetime, a fantastic opportunity for the MO5 association to preserve France's digital heritage - phew! So he set off to collect the sacred beast by train with David Soumet, the vice-president, and very proudly brought it back home, before it was made available to the association's specialists. He is coordinating the association's efforts to restore the machine as best he can, and has set up the dedicated campaign page with the Com team to make everyone's work easier. The rest of the time, he marvels at every advance made by the restoration team, constantly repeating (it must be his age too) that it's amazing what we're managing to achieve together, while keeping in mind an essential question for him: "Can our Micral N run Doom?
Viveris : Viveris is one of our many partners in our Micral N restoration campaign, and we are particularly indebted to them for making their electronics laboratory available at their Rungis site. They are specialists in electronic design and production. Their welcome is all the more gratifying given that the technical resources made available to us far exceed our expectations, proof that they agree with us that the restoration of this computer heritage piece is very important.
The Viveris website will of course be much more detailed than this short presentation: https://www.viveris.fr/
Antoine, Arthur, Maxime&Maxime, Jean, Benoist, Jacky, Sébastien and the Com de MO5, Kendo and Vanessa : Our special thanks go to all those who have supported us throughout the restoration campaign, for their help, their advice, their English translations and their links with other international institutions such as the CHM, with which we are building ever stronger bridges. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for all your help!
We'd also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has already contributed to our fundraising campaign for the restoration work, which has now raised over €15,000 of the €20,000 expected! Thank you all so much! And if you want to help us too, please feel free to share the articles about the restoration of our Micral N and take part in the campaign that is enabling us to carry out this work: https://micral.mo5.com