Exciting times are still with us.? It seems though that as we aged,
somehow we lost the excitement.? Today we can buy components
for a few pennies, and there are a myriad of software languages
to play with.? Must be that we are just not that excitable these days.
Arv _._
Tom:
My first computer was homemade: A Processor Technology Sol-20 with a modified Hitachi TV for a monitor.
I wrote an accounting package on it, and ran in 8K of memory using 90K 5.25" FLOPPY DISKS! That eventually lead to my software company, Ecosoft. I dropped the accounting package and concentrated on a statistics package (Microstat) and C programming tools (Eco-C88 C compiler, editor, assembler, and linker). We even had an IDE for the compiler with the entire tool chain embodied in it.
At the time I was teaching a Butler University and a colleague and I built 11 Sol-20's and opened a computing lab, mainly for stats (plus Lotus 123). The Math Dept. got PO'ed because the computer lab was in the College of Business. The College of Business even let me teach a Z80 assembler course as a "business course"...tons of people from Eli Lily.
Those were exciting times!
Jack, W8TEE
On Wednesday, March 24, 2021, 9:46:26 PM EDT, Tom, wb6b < wb6b@...> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 06:13 PM, Jack, W8TEE wrote:
Try typing in: "Wadayamean What?"
If I included the quotation marks, it replied with "How?". Otherwise: "What?" ----- Cut --------
Starting up TinyBasic Plus...
?
65362 bytes free.
OK
>Wadayamean What?
Wadayamean What?
What??
?
----------------
>"Wadayamean What?"
"Wadayamean What?"
How?
--------------
I need to find a old issue of Dr. Dobbs and start typing some Basic code.? If the Basic was supposed to give some kind of wiseacre response. Maybe this basic is too small to be a wise guy, too. So imagine running those old text based Dungeon and Dragons games on an Arduino Nano. I had an old Star Trek game that used two funny special charters from the display ROM of a Processor Technology 64 x 16 ASCII terminal S-100 card. Like they would keep swapping between a couple of funny round shapes to make the Klingon's mouth move when he was talking and generally making threats of one kind or another. If that was written in basic, now I could, with a little more firmware, relive those glorious days on a 0.91inch OLED display. The new possible use for the board I may not use for my audio filter project. ? Tom, wb6b
--
Jack, W8TEE
|
I only met Woz once, and that was just a brief introduction by Chris DeVoney, VP at Que. However, he seemed very engaging when we met. I wish I could have had more time with him.
Jack, W8TEE
On Thursday, March 25, 2021, 1:38:00 PM EDT, Tom, wb6b <wb6b@...> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 08:30 AM, Jack, W8TEE wrote:
Gates: "I'll bet you wish now that you had taken it, don't you?"
That is an amazing story. Yes, what a memory he must have. If I'd ever taken a job at Apple (phone interviewed a couple of times, but that is as far as it went), heaven help me if I'd run into Jobs. He may have remembered me from those early days.? I've heard Steve Wozniak is actually a really nice guy. When I lived in the Bay Area, a friend of mine her son went to the same school that I assume his kids went to. But, in any case Woz volunteered as a computer teacher for the kids at the school.? Tom, wb6b
-- Jack, W8TEE
|
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 08:30 AM, Jack, W8TEE wrote:
Gates: "I'll bet you wish now that you had taken it, don't you?"
That is an amazing story. Yes, what a memory he must have. If I'd ever taken a job at Apple (phone interviewed a couple of times, but that is as far as it went), heaven help me if I'd run into Jobs. He may have remembered me from those early days.? I've heard Steve Wozniak is actually a really nice guy. When I lived in the Bay Area, a friend of mine her son went to the same school that I assume his kids went to. But, in any case Woz volunteered as a computer teacher for the kids at the school.? Tom, wb6b
|
Tom
Great!? I am not quite ready to include the Tiny Basic part, but
it is getting close.? I'm obviously not going to have the pico-OS
ready for 1 April publication.? Making the former April Fools day
project into a real project has added too much coding to meet my
1 April deadline, so I will have to publish it a bit later.? This has
turned into a fun project.? More later...
Arv _._
On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 4:01 PM Tom, wb6b < wb6b@...> wrote: On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 06:26 PM, Jack, W8TEE wrote:
I remember reading Tim Pittman's Tiny Basic in Dr. Dobbs Journal
I downloaded the Tiny Basic "plus" for the Arduino and discovered it included a makefile so you could compile it and run Tiny Basic on your computer as a command line program. There were no instructions, but I CDed into the "cli" directory and ran make. In just a few seconds it compiled the tiny basic ".ino" file and it now runs tiny basic on my Mac. My memory of Basic is faded. Other than print "hello", everything else I've typed in has been greeted by the response "what?".
Brings back old memories.
Tom, wb6b
?
|
Tom:
I never met Jobs, but did meet Steve Wozniak in SF once. Back in 1981, I was writing a Basic80 book and found a bug in the compiler. So I called Microsoft and asked to speak with Bill Gates. The lady asked what the call was about and I explained I was writing a book on Basic80 and found a bug in the compiler. Ten seconds later and I was talking with Gates about the bug. He said they were aware of it and that it had been fixed and would be in the next release. We continued to talk for, perhaps, 10 more minutes. At the end, he said: "Would you consider coming to work for Microsoft?" At the time, Microsoft had about 25 employees and I was a tenured economics professor with two young kids. I told him I was flattered, but I was pretty happy where I was.
That's not the end of the story. Fast forward about 12 years to the Software Development Conference in SF. I had given a paper earlier that day and was enjoying my 5PM anti-malaria medicine when the organizer of the conference asked me to come to their suite for drinks around 10PM. I was exhausted, but knew it would be bad politics to say no, so I agreed. I trundled up to the suite and recognized Dan Saks sitting at the end of a couch. An adjoining couch had an empty space, so I plunked down and started talking with Dan. We talked for a few minutes, after which Dan said: "Do I need to introduce you to the man next to you?" I turned only to find that my butt was sharing a cushion with Bill Gates. Before I could recover, Dan said: "Bill, this is Jack Purdum"
Gates said: "Purdum...Purdum...Didn't I talk to you about 10 years ago about a book you were writing?"
Stunned, I said: "Yes." Gates: "In fact, didn't I offer you a job?" Gulp..."Yes" Gates: "I'll bet you wish now that you had taken it, don't you?" Me: ...can't talk...
To me, the amazing part of the story is that Gates, with everything that had transpired to him in the intervening years could remember a 10 minute phone conversation from 12 years in the past. My guess is that's one reason he's such an adept businessman. Amazing...
Jack, W8TEE
On Thursday, March 25, 2021, 12:15:08 AM EDT, Tom, wb6b <wb6b@...> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 07:17 PM, Jack, W8TEE wrote:
My first computer was homemade: A Processor Technology Sol-20 with a modified Hitachi TV for a monitor.
?
That's really great. I had a IMSAI 8080, but used the Processor Technology video board. Same one as in your computer. Then, waited, and waited for a good Basic. Processor Technology finally came up with a very good Basic, so I burned the Processor Technology boot loader into some EPROMs and added their cassette tape card and was very happy. Finally got a 2.5MB hard drive and surplus controller and wrote my own CP/M drivers for the hard drive. 2.5MB, I was in heaven. Great that you actually built a business based in the early computer revolution. I wonder how many people have ever had the pleasure of dressing down Steve Jobs. Talk about hubris! He personally came to our computer club to sell his new Apple Twos. I was using my IMSAI 8080 for small accounting jobs for my business at the time.? Steve was telling me how wonderful his Apple two was. I saw it as a play toy for people who couldn't solder and only wanted to play games. Not a "Real" computer. I told him I just did not think the Apple II was good enough. It only had integer basic, and I was doing "serious" programming of business programs. He paused and looked for a moment. Then said, ah, ah, you could scale your numbers in your calculations. But, (in all my geeky young arrogance) said that simply was not good enough. He better put a floating point basic in it before I could take it seriously. Well, apparently my opinion of the Apple did not harm the success of Apple one bit. He got very rich, I haven't. I still take pride in soldering, but I'm wiser (maybe a little) to what is practical and people actually want. ? ? Not dead yet, maybe I'll still make some money from this computer revolution.? Tom, wb6b
-- Jack, W8TEE
|
When in high school back in the dark ages, I remember thinking if I was hugely successful and lucky, I might someday have an HP calculator to play with.? In college, started out submitting card decks in FORTRAN to the CDC3300 at the OSU computer center, this was not exciting.? Later, getting time on the ASR33 teletype machines with a very bogged down time shared serial line into that same machine, it started to be kind of fun.? What really hooked me was an assembly language class where we got to program a PDP8 on an ASR33.? One of the assignments was to create a multiply routine by simply adding one number to itself n times, which struck me as awfully lame.? I spent several days during boring lectures in another class (electromagnetics) figuring out PDP8 code to do this efficiently using shifts and adds, when I submitted the code is was marked down for being obviously plagiarized.? Senior project was decoding Morse off the air on an IMSAI-8080.? My first job out of school involved building a graphics workstation running UCSD Pascal on a Z80.? I didn't feel a need to have a computer at home, I could just work late.? Did blow $100 on a Timex Sinclair ZX81, hacked a bunch of static RAM on the back, wrote a game of life for it and a Runga-Kutta differential equation solver, but it mostly sat unused.? In the late 80's I finally threw $1000 at a Toshiba T1000, which was a game changer for me.? It ran MSDOS, but the Thompson PCNT shell gave me vi and awk and a unix-like shell prompt that all got sucked into a RAM disk from a floppy at boot.? Also on the floppy was a TurboC compiler (a single memory model and a minimum of libraries) so I could code in C anywhere.? On the job when having to code for some strange machine, I could use it as an RS232 terminal into that machine and pipe code I had written in vi out to the crippled text editor resident on that machine (writing a DMA device driver for a Gould in FORTRAN comes to mind), not sit for days with that machine.? ?Since it lacked internet, I'd probably be more productive today if I was still using that T1000.? When I cracked the screen in the mid 90's I was bereft, couldn't find a cheap lightweight machine that would replace it till netbooks came out around 2008.
|
I went to a number of those shows. The first one was in SF at the (Brown??) Convention Center. I went because Que Publishing was going to launch my C Programming Guide book at the show. The Stanford Computer Book Store (??) agreed to dedicate a table to the book and I stood in the background when the show opened. I saw a young lady stop at the table, pick up the book, leaf through it and, to my heart's discontent, put it back on the table. A few minutes later, she was back and repeated the process, but again put it back. Finally, she came back a third time and I couldn't stand it any more. I walked over and said:
Me: "That's a really good book. You should buy it." Her: "Have you read it?" Me: "Yes" Her: "OK. I've heard a lot about C, so I'll by it!" Me: "Would you like me to autograph it?" Her: "You wrote it??" Me: "Yep."
She damn-near fainted on me. That was the first copy sold. The book went on for 3 editions, sold 237,000 copies domestically, and was translated into 10 foreign languages. Today, in part due to torrent sites that rip off books, selling 10,000 copies is considered a successful book. Sad, because we will never know how many great books didn't get written because authors knew it wasn't worth writing any more.
Jack, W8TEE
On Thursday, March 25, 2021, 10:13:33 AM EDT, Tom, wb6b <wb6b@...> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 06:57 AM, Jack, W8TEE wrote:
Those were fun times!
Yes the were. I remember the West Coast Computer Fairs. Everything from crazy to amazing on display from both companies and individuals showing off their creations.? Would hop on a Southwest Airlines flight in the morning, spend the day at the fair and hop another flight back to Orange County in the evening. Amazing. $20 flights, no security delays. One time they even delayed the rollout, by a minute or so, of the plane because they saw me running towards the checkin counter for the flight. Tom, wb6b
-- Jack, W8TEE
|
Farhan:
The first C compiler I used was Ron Cain's Tiny C, which was published in Dr. Dobbs. As I recall, it did not support FP, nor did it do structures. Still, it was free and an easy way to get your feet wet in the C pool.
Philippe Kahn, president of Borland, actually bought 25 Eco-C88 compilers at one time. He also bought virtually all of the competitors, too. I couldn't figure out why, since I knew he had a team from Sweden (??) working on what was to eventually become Turbo-C. However, they had a falling out with Philippe and, the next day, Philippe went into their offices and they took everything and left during the night. Because Philippe had carefully leaked the advent of the Turbo-C product, it was vaporware when the leaks started to appear. The result was to find a C compiler he could buy...and fast! The Eco-C88 already had an IDE, but we lacked what was called the Large Model code generator. I can't remember the name of the compiler that ended up being Turbo-C, but I did meet the guy who wrote it at the Software Development Conference in Boston once and he did have a very good C compiler. The Lattice C compiler by Dave Schmidt ended up morphing into the Microsoft C compiler. When Borland and Microsoft jumped into the sandbox, there wasn't much room left for us small guys. Still, it was fun while it lasted!
Jack, W8TEE
On Thursday, March 25, 2021, 2:43:38 AM EDT, Ashhar Farhan <farhanbox@...> wrote:
Dr. Dobbs usually arrived in India a couple of months late on some magazine stands (actually, just one, in bombay). I was always fascinated by the Ads, I remember seeing Eco-88 in the backpages as a small black and white Ad. Those days, I was trying to get the Brain Damage Software C (BDS-C) going on a cp/m system that i had put together for my undergraduate, final year project. I never worked, but I did manage to write the BIOS, get it to boot from a 5-1/4 inch floppy. It was a miracle as I only had a multimeter to debug. My Elmer's office had a 5 Mhz Tek that I could never figure out how to use. What changed everything was Turbo C. It was an integrated development system for the rest of us. Even today, the Arduino IDE is just a clone of that, as much as the visual studio is. four tabs: editor, file list, status/command window and the debugger. it was a heavens! it takes me a good ten minutes to configure that system with tmux on linux. does anyone have a script for that? - f
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 12:06 PM mister35mm via <mister35mm= [email protected]> wrote: I'd love a SOL-20 and an Edixy Sorcerer and Intertec Superbrain and a DEC VT-180 and a NorthStar Advantage and....
Stephen G7VFY
--
Jack, W8TEE
|
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 06:57 AM, Jack, W8TEE wrote:
Those were fun times!
Yes the were. I remember the West Coast Computer Fairs. Everything from crazy to amazing on display from both companies and individuals showing off their creations.? Would hop on a Southwest Airlines flight in the morning, spend the day at the fair and hop another flight back to Orange County in the evening. Amazing. $20 flights, no security delays. One time they even delayed the rollout, by a minute or so, of the plane because they saw me running towards the checkin counter for the flight. Tom, wb6b
|
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 05:47 AM, Dean Souleles wrote:
Trip down memory lane complete....
An interesting trip. You've covered a lot of ground.? I remember having a Hercules Graphics card. I seem to remember having a monochrome video monitor with yellow phosphor connected to it. Seems like phosphor and long/medium/short persistence was a hot topic for techies, in the know, at the time.? Running an ISP must have been an adventure. I first used a dial up ISP service in the Bay Area called Best Internet. They had a BBS area for talk about the service. Downtime, changes, etc. Their one big server was frequently crashing. The company that made the server was famous for amazing graphics and scientific computing, not systems for serving lots of users. For some reason I always remember an upset user's post about the downtime. "I see that Major Fault and Kernel Crash have brought the servers down again......." . Tom, wb6b
|
Mornin' Tom:
Actually, I never intended to write a C compiler or market one. What I did want was to have a good C compiler that would allow us to convert our statistics package to C. Leor Zolman had a wonderful (and very fast) C compiler for CP/M, but it didn't include any floating point capabilities. He was a student at MIT at the time and I met him in Boston to try and convince him to add FP to his BDS C compiler. (BDS--Brain Dead Software!) He just didn't have the time. Whitesmith's C compiler had floating point, but putting a printf() statement in a tight for loop would literally take almost a second between prints...way too slow. Solution: take Leor's compiler to write our own C compiler, which is what we did. We used Cody and Waite's book for the FP stuff.
Most of the code for the compiler was written by Tim Leslie, one of the best coders I've ever met. We went to a computer show at McCormick Place in Chicago to market our stats package. We had one computer running with a copy of the cover of the C Programming Guide. We had more people ask how we reproduced that book cover on the computer than we did for info on the stats package. The result was a new product: the Eco-C88 compiler. I had a hard time convincing Tim to allow me to call the editor CMore because it was "too cutesy" a play on "getting more out of C". He almost had a coronary when I suggested calling our librarian program Prudence. I thought it called up images of a pinched-nose librarian who took her work very seriously. He begged to differ...
Those were fun times!
Jack, W8TEE
On Thursday, March 25, 2021, 3:56:06 AM EDT, Tom, wb6b <wb6b@...> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 11:43 PM, Ashhar Farhan wrote:
seeing Eco-88 in the backpages as a small black and white Ad.
That is interesting. I just googled a bit and found this that mentions Jack and his C book. I remember Turbo Pascal, but for some reason I don't remember using Turbo-C, sounds like I missed out on a good compiler, I used another early C compiler. I'm going to have to try to remember what it was. I remember for quite some time always compiling to assembly code and looking at to see if I was happy with the code produced by a compiler. I think I finally got over that. Also had, I believe Digital Research, PLM because I used that "Professional" language in one of my college computer classes. Did not like all the restrictive licensing and royalties if I actually tried to sell something if I wrote it in that PLM complier. So, kind of lost interest in PLM (a good thing) and went back to C.? The C compiler I used, also gave the source code for the startup and math libraries so if you were trying to do something embedded you could cut that part down. (Heavens!... Maybe even strip out the floating point libraries :) ) Tom, wb6b I like C because (more so at the time) you can kind of visualize the whole transformation of your C code, to Assembly code and the actual registers in the machine.? When I see some of the questions on Quora from new programmers about programming languages, I can see they have no connection to how languages operate on hardware. Especially when they think the languages are an entity of themselves and could be new and faster than C or assembly language, or I guess faster than the hardware in the computer itself. They seem amazed that their amazing better language could have possibility been written in C. How could that happen? Where could these new programming constructs, speed and?paradigms come from if written in such a faulty language lacking the raw material (such?paradigms and constructs) to be able to build these new things. Tom, wb6b
-- Jack, W8TEE
|
Re: 0.000000 on boot and no control
#ubitx
Hi Dean,
As I understood he has one V3 and one V6 which has the Nano on the back flipped.
Raj, vu2zap
toggle quoted message
Show quoted text
At 25/03/2021, you wrote: Yes Don, the Raduino Nano is downside up!
Fine business on the repair.
Dean
KK4DAS
|
Re: 0.000000 on boot and no control
#ubitx
Yes Don, the Raduino Nano is downside up!
Fine business on the repair.
Dean
KK4DAS
|
So I thought I would join the "old programmers club" thread.?
I am nearly as old and more worn out than some of our colleagues here on the board and have written software professionally and personally for over 40 years in more languages and on more architectures than I can remember.? In college and professionally writing mainframe code on punch cards for IBM and Sperry computers.? I recall in college having to buy fixed sector floppy disks for some early computer lab.? ?Early professional work was a data collection sensor on a small PDP-11 using whatever DEC's version of a tiny RTOS was at the time.? Had to hack the serial drivers and interrupt handler to keep up with the baby logic analyze we built to collect the data.? As I recall - all written in assembler.? A bunch of work on special military computers in obscure languages that no-one has every heard of - TACPOL, CMS2....if you got good at those the defense contractors would pay you a lot of money at the time.? Anyone else ever been a System Programmer for a Perkin Elmer minicomputer?? ?I learned Pascal pre-publication from one of Niklaus Wirth's grad students who told a story.... when Wirth was asked how to pronounce his last name in English he is said to have replied: "If by value, it is 'Worth', if by reference it is 'Virth'".? I liked Pascal (coming from Fortran and Cobol) as soon as I saw it and my code remains very "Pascal like" to this day.? I wrote a full 6502 emulator in Turbo Pascal for reasons that are lost on me today.? Professionally again - at NASA JPL I worked on one of the first large-scale Ada applications.? I liked that language very much - strong typing, objects, inheritance, generics, multi-threading. When C++ came along - I smiled - "been there, done that."? Along the way were projects in LISP, Algol, Snobol, and yes, even Forth.? A lot of Unix and derivatives over the years - I liked X Windows - still like the programming model.? On the hobby side I couldn't afford an Apple anything and when PC's came along they were out of my league until the clones hit.? So I turned to Commodore - traded in a Pong video game and $100 for a C-64 at K-Mart if memory serves.? Wrote my own DOS for it - put it on a EPROM plugged into the cartridge slot.? I still have my UV EPROM eraser up in the garage somewhere.? Wrote some games using Sprite graphics, even wrote the first GIF viewer for it working with the guys on Compuserve.? When PC clones became relatively cheap, and I had relatively more money I ditched the beloved C64 and went full PC clone and never turned back? (did I really pay $1500 for 8MB of RAM? Yes I did.)? I wrote an early set of "Hercules graphics" drivers for the PC clone so I could render GIFs in dithered monochrome and port the early fractal image programs to the PC. I never owned and IBM or Apple anything until the iPod came out.? Built most my PC clones from components purchased at Fry's (I'll miss you Fry's).? ?Was strictly an Android user until I finally broke ranks and bought an iPad a couple of years ago to Facetime with my mother because Skype was too complicated for her.? Did more banging around in Unix and Linux variants? over the years than I care to remember.? Am proficient at it but I learned to loathe just about everything about Linux, and still pretty much detest C as a programming language. Linux makes easy things difficult - like plugging in a USB device and expecting it to work. C makes it too easy to shoot your foot off and never know it.? Never understood the Microsoft bashers - reasonable OS running on hundreds of millions of computers that has continually improved over time and mostly just works in the background and stays out of your way.? But I am an equal opportunity offender - I'll use whatever technology solves the problem.
Oh yeah, there was that mid-career self-funded tech startup - a dial-up Internet Service Provider in Los Angeles in the early 90s.? Too early to be a money losing Internet startup that folks would pour barrels of money on.
Lastly - a plea to not abandon the venerable Arduino Nano just yet.? You can buy handfuls of them for less than a couple of Lattes at Starbucks.? The Arduino IDE and associated libraries (even as fraught as some of them are) make it fun to program.? And there are still many, many things you can do with it - including most of what we need for? radio control interfaces.? Serious DSP and SDR will require more horsepower, but again I pick the tech for the job I am trying to solve.
Trip down memory lane complete....
Cheers and 73
Dean
KK4DAS
|
Re: Problems with adding Nextion Display and CEC Software
Agreed, I had problems until I selected the??ATMega328P (Old Bootloader) option, then all was OK.
73, Bill
|
uBITX V6.1 - IF-S in CEC +.2 ?
Hi - with success I use the V6.1 /2.8" Nextio and the 1.2 Software from Ian (TnX Ian)
I also made more enhancements as a AUX Connecton for connecting Fldig, and enhanced the Audio Amplifier, after the Audio-Filter.
Just had a QSO from EA8 to SM7 over abt 4000km in QRP. Great radio !
Suddentlyy one more station calling near our frequency. I tried to switch on the IF-Shift....
But is seems does not work as expected.? The Bar is able to move from left to right ... On left sig go away abt from center comes up and rightmost is like the IF-S is off (full Sig):
It works like the Attenuator (the Attenuator works, but the IF-S has more Att effect as the Att itself)
What could be wrong ??
Maybe from misstuning anywhere ? (The QRG is now accurate to abt 10-20 Hz)
Tnx for suggestions - Erich
?
--
---
73 de Erich
HB9FIH
HS0ZLS
|
On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 11:43 PM, Ashhar Farhan wrote:
seeing Eco-88 in the backpages as a small black and white Ad.
That is interesting. I just googled a bit and found this that mentions Jack and his C book. I remember Turbo Pascal, but for some reason I don't remember using Turbo-C, sounds like I missed out on a good compiler, I used another early C compiler. I'm going to have to try to remember what it was. I remember for quite some time always compiling to assembly code and looking at to see if I was happy with the code produced by a compiler. I think I finally got over that. Also had, I believe Digital Research, PLM because I used that "Professional" language in one of my college computer classes. Did not like all the restrictive licensing and royalties if I actually tried to sell something if I wrote it in that PLM complier. So, kind of lost interest in PLM (a good thing) and went back to C.? The C compiler I used, also gave the source code for the startup and math libraries so if you were trying to do something embedded you could cut that part down. (Heavens!... Maybe even strip out the floating point libraries :) ) Tom, wb6b I like C because (more so at the time) you can kind of visualize the whole transformation of your C code, to Assembly code and the actual registers in the machine.? When I see some of the questions on Quora from new programmers about programming languages, I can see they have no connection to how languages operate on hardware. Especially when they think the languages are an entity of themselves and could be new and faster than C or assembly language, or I guess faster than the hardware in the computer itself. They seem amazed that their amazing better language could have possibility been written in C. How could that happen? Where could these new programming constructs, speed and?paradigms come from if written in such a faulty language lacking the raw material (such?paradigms and constructs) to be able to build these new things. Tom, wb6b
|
Dr. Dobbs usually arrived in India a couple of months late on some magazine stands (actually, just one, in bombay). I was always fascinated by the Ads, I remember seeing Eco-88 in the backpages as a small black and white Ad. Those days, I was trying to get the Brain Damage Software C (BDS-C) going on a cp/m system that i had put together for my undergraduate, final year project. I never worked, but I did manage to write the BIOS, get it to boot from a 5-1/4 inch floppy. It was a miracle as I only had a multimeter to debug. My Elmer's office had a 5 Mhz Tek that I could never figure out how to use. What changed everything was Turbo C. It was an integrated development system for the rest of us. Even today, the Arduino IDE is just a clone of that, as much as the visual studio is. four tabs: editor, file list, status/command window and the debugger. it was a heavens! it takes me a good ten minutes to configure that system with tmux on linux. does anyone have a script for that? - f
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 12:06 PM mister35mm via <mister35mm= [email protected]> wrote: I'd love a SOL-20 and an Edixy Sorcerer and Intertec Superbrain and a DEC VT-180 and a NorthStar Advantage and....
Stephen G7VFY
|
I'd love a SOL-20 and an Edixy Sorcerer and Intertec Superbrain and a DEC VT-180 and a NorthStar Advantage and....
Stephen G7VFY
|
On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 07:17 PM, Jack, W8TEE wrote:
My first computer was homemade: A Processor Technology Sol-20 with a modified Hitachi TV for a monitor.
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That's really great. I had a IMSAI 8080, but used the Processor Technology video board. Same one as in your computer. Then, waited, and waited for a good Basic. Processor Technology finally came up with a very good Basic, so I burned the Processor Technology boot loader into some EPROMs and added their cassette tape card and was very happy. Finally got a 2.5MB hard drive and surplus controller and wrote my own CP/M drivers for the hard drive. 2.5MB, I was in heaven. Great that you actually built a business based in the early computer revolution. I wonder how many people have ever had the pleasure of dressing down Steve Jobs. Talk about hubris! He personally came to our computer club to sell his new Apple Twos. I was using my IMSAI 8080 for small accounting jobs for my business at the time.? Steve was telling me how wonderful his Apple two was. I saw it as a play toy for people who couldn't solder and only wanted to play games. Not a "Real" computer. I told him I just did not think the Apple II was good enough. It only had integer basic, and I was doing "serious" programming of business programs. He paused and looked for a moment. Then said, ah, ah, you could scale your numbers in your calculations. But, (in all my geeky young arrogance) said that simply was not good enough. He better put a floating point basic in it before I could take it seriously. Well, apparently my opinion of the Apple did not harm the success of Apple one bit. He got very rich, I haven't. I still take pride in soldering, but I'm wiser (maybe a little) to what is practical and people actually want. ? ? Not dead yet, maybe I'll still make some money from this computer revolution.? Tom, wb6b
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