Fuse-link proms predates the Altair!? It was the first effort to get off the front panel
using two 32x4 parts as 32 bytes was enough[barely] to run a binary loader.
Before that I'd use them to build simple state machine logic.
The goal was turnkey startup.? To make that happen a IO board was created and
a tape recorder highly modified to create a saturation read/write with FM encoding.
Once the bugs were out I could load files at about 2.5kbytes a second.?
The NS* Disk was a huge step up.? However it was in the Altair chassis?
and when it would crash [its favorite habit] it would munge the disk. That lead to
the NS* Horizon.? ?Soon after a 765 FDC and a bit of effort lead to a better floppy
system 360K per 5.25" drive which was then huge and 1MB for a SA850 8".? By
1980 I had a Teltek controller and a ST506.? Having 5MB and CP/M was finally
a time when space {enough of it} was not an issue.? ?That machine lives now?
with two 31mb Quantum D540, Z80 at 10mhz, 256K of mapped ram, and a highly
modded version of CP/M I never let out (CP/M2.2 that could multiprocess,
but not MPM) as it was a bit too weird but ran everything CP/M.? At that time
I had 4 machines running CP/M only two with disks as they could "network"
using high speed (19200 baud) serial bus between each other and share files.
The goal wa capability of the PDP-8 running TSS-8 (timesharing),? PDP11
RSTS and VAX/VMS.
Terminals the first non TTY was a Ct1024 then VDM-1.? Those were upstaged by
a H19 with modified software (emulated a Vt52 properly).? Later real VT100,
Vt180, VT320s.
Along the way TinyC and Ron Cains SmallC were part of the library along with
BDS C.? ?My favorite editor was Vedit as it was Teco compatible and was also
full screen mode that understood the Vt100 and VT320 cursor keys..
I kept a lot of the old hardware. over the years added more.? Over the years
there were two constants Computers and Communications.
Allison
