Part of the Micral N restoration team at the Viveris premises. From left to right: Antoine, Jean-François, Sylvain, Yoann, Philippe and Hervé
In this sixth article, we are going to review the members of the MO5 association who are working to restore our Micral N and get it running again!
Jean-François Del Nero : Jean-François is our chief technical engineer. Give him anything with a bit of electronics in it, he’ll fix it, make it work, and… hack it. Inevitably. He is also a creator of genius, and father, among other things, of the HxC floppy drive emulator that has changed the lives of thousands of people around the world, and of Pauline, THE tool for scanning and archiving the contents of these same floppy disks. The Minitel was supposedly a dumb terminal? Défi relevé, Jeff made a 3D demo on it, viewable on Youtube. Extremely rare Squale computers? Same thing, they’re all fixed now and working, and the only demo that ever existed in the world is his own. It even seems that one day, he will succeed in running a DOS demo inside an LCD screen, without a computer. Promise. So, we presented our Micral N to Jean-François for him to pamper and take care of. You should have seen his smile 😉
Sylvain Glaize :Sylvain is our crazy coder. Anything that is programmed by instructions or via a language is one more beast to learn and dissect for Sylvain. And the older and more constrained it is, the more it thrills him. However, he creates some of the most modern video games in one of the biggest studios in the world – go figure! He also worships 8-bit microcomputers that display only a few colors, especially if they are equipped with a triangle key. He owns a fine collection of them, which he takes good care of on a regular basis and even programs games on! And when we told him that we’d gotten our hands on a Micral N equipped with an Intel 8008, the second microprocessor in the world, for a split second he lost his legendary composure and revealed an unusual enthusiasm: we knew then that we had touched his big heart and piqued his interest. Now, Sylvain is serenely working on the virtual clone of the Micral N!
Yoann Le Bars :Yoann is our computer code guardian: he is the chief software archiving manager of the association. And does he know about code! As a child, he was already coding clever shoot ’em up games in Pascal, a language he still dreams of at night. He also likes old systems, Unix machines, stuff so old that teenagers only remember hearing about them in Jurassic Park. Indeed, this film is an ode to the power of some of his favorite machines: the Silicon Graphics stations! So, he thought he would program a port of Another World for them, just like that, easy-peasy. Actually, the only thing Yoann cannot do, just like all of us, is find free time to work on all the projects of the MO5 association, including a revolutionary inventory tool. But hey, retirement age is coming, so let’s keep hope!
Hervé Le Bouler :Hervé could be said to be the person of trust within the MO5 association, the one to whom you can assign a mission with total confidence. Just like Rambo, you can send him to any of the association’s exhibitions, even 4000 miles away in Canada to set up Game Story with you and return alone to France with collectibles in his suitcase. As he knows a lot about old computers and has read the scarce books available in France on the history of the French computer industry, we thought it would be a good idea for him to lead the interviews of R2E engineers still among us, and it works! You’ll soon be able to read some of his articles on the subject. Hervé often offers to drive other members with his car and loves raspberry-flavored computers, so what more could you ask for?
Philippe Dubois : Philippe is the conductor. It was him who called the seller of the Micral N with a pounding heart, thinking that it was the opportunity of a lifetime, a fantastic chance for the MO5 association to preserve the French digital heritage – phew! He therefore went to fetch the holy beast by train with David Soumet, our vice-president, and brought it very proudly back home, before making it available to the experts of the association. He coordinates as best he can the restoration efforts and has set up with the communication team the dedicated campaign page in order to facilitate everyone’s work. The rest of the time, he marvels at each advance of the restoration team, constantly repeating (it must be old age, too) how great it is to achieve all this together, while keeping in mind an essential question for him: “Can our Micral N run Doom?” :/
Viveris :Viveris is one of our many partners for our Micral N restoration campaign, and we owe them in particular the provision of their electronic laboratory at their Rungis site. They are specialists in electronic design and production. The way they welcomed us pleases us all the more since the technical means made available are far superior to our expectations, which shows they agree with us that the restoration of this piece of computer heritage is very important.
The Viveris website is of course much more precise than this short presentation: https://www.viveris.fr/
Antoine, Arthur, Maxime&Maxime, Jean, Benoist, Jacky, Sébastien as well as MO5’s communication team Kendo and Vanessa: Our special thanks go to all those who work with us throughout the restoration campaign, for their help, their advice, their English translations and their connections with other international institutions such as the CHM, with which we are building increasingly strong bridges. Thank you ladies and gentlemen for your great help!
We also take this opportunity to thank those who have already contributed to our fundraising campaign for the restoration work, which has reached as of today more than 15,000 € out of the 20,000 € expected! Thank you to everyone! And if you want to help us too, do not hesitate to share the articles about the restoration of our Micral N, and to contribute to the campaign which enables us to carry out this endeavour: : https://micral.mo5.com
