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This thread is pure gold.? I'm a bit younger -- my well-worn copy of K&R is the "Draft ANSI C" version -- but I was reading and dreaming of all these people and things since my single-digit ages in the '70s. Thank you all!

Arv:

I had a chance to meet Gary Killdal near Monterey when I was with Dick Summe (President and co-founder of Que) during that same book-launch trip to SF. I always wanted to know about his "FM Encoding" that he developed for CP/M. I asked him if FM was some form of Frequency Modulation of the digital data. (What did I know...I'm a software guy.) He smiled and said: "No. It stands for F*&%ing Magic!" I then asked about his new double-density disks that used MFM encoding. He smiled again: "More F*&%ing Magic". I instantly liked the guy!

Jack, W8TEE

On Thursday, March 25, 2021, 3:57:51 PM EDT, Arv Evans <arvid.evans@...> wrote:

Bill

The number of players back in those "bad old days" was much smaller

than the number of players today.? Back then it was not unusual to know

or have met 50% of the experts.? Today there are thousands of "experts",

with many now being "self anointed experts" to the point that knowing

just a few percent of the most worthy is mostly impossible.

Many of those past year experts have now passed on (Gary Kildare-CP/M,

Steve Jobs-Apple, Dennis Richie-UNIX, etc.).

Arv

_._

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 1:17 PM Bill Cromwell <wrcromwell@...> wrote:

Hi,

This thread has gone on and on and on for almost ever and so far off topic! No. This is not a complaint. Those who do not want to see it can click on the "ignore this thread" button - sometines labeled "ignore this subject" - and never see it again. You won't even to overexert your poor, exhausted index finger wearing out your delete key. Just *gone* forever.

Once upon a time I started programming too. I had "real" work to do and those newfangled computers looked like very useful tools. I could buy (or steal) software to do inventory or accounting tasks but they always di a job the way somebody else wanted to do it and not *MY* way. So I started programming. My "real" work suffered due to time wasted writing programs. Then I found better software packages that could be configured to do my work the way I wanted it done and I dumped that programming stuff. I moved right out of the closet and went to doing "real" work. I was labeled "power user" - not programmer. Not that such programming isn't 'real" work. If you like it or somebody is paying you to it - or even better, both - it qualifies as "real" work. I am only in it again because I can use it to help do some "real" work that I am interested in and the Arduino type tools are much closer to the configurable software I chose all those weeks ago. The lies that are getting swapped in this thread are remarkably similar to my own fables of the past:)

73,

Bill? KU8H

bark less - wag more

On 3/25/21 1:28 PM, Arv Evans wrote:

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
?

--
Jack, W8TEE

If Musk is halfway right, it's about to get more than amazing:
? ??

Opinions vary, but most researchers in AI do expect the singularity to arrive in the next few decades.
And when it happens, things will get just plain weird.
Hopefully IT will find amusement in allowing us to pass the time coding in Forth on our Nano clones.
Shouldn't pose much of a threat.

Jerry, KE7ER


On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 11:02 AM, Tom, wb6b wrote:

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 10:45 AM, Arv Evans wrote:

Must be that we are just not that excitable these days.

It is still amazing. This current computer revolution has been going on for about 40 years.?

It is amazing how much is still fundamentally the same. Although in the last five years, it seems there have been actual new things introduced, not just rehashed or rediscovered old things. Although I'm at a loss to enumerate them at the moment.?

Tom, wb6b

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

Hi,

This thread has gone on and on and on for almost ever and so far off topic! No. This is not a complaint. Those who do not want to see it can click on the "ignore this thread" button - sometines labeled "ignore this subject" - and never see it again. You won't even to overexert your poor, exhausted index finger wearing out your delete key. Just *gone* forever.

Once upon a time I started programming too. I had "real" work to do and those newfangled computers looked like very useful tools. I could buy (or steal) software to do inventory or accounting tasks but they always di a job the way somebody else wanted to do it and not *MY* way. So I started programming. My "real" work suffered due to time wasted writing programs. Then I found better software packages that could be configured to do my work the way I wanted it done and I dumped that programming stuff. I moved right out of the closet and went to doing "real" work. I was labeled "power user" - not programmer. Not that such programming isn't 'real" work. If you like it or somebody is paying you to it - or even better, both - it qualifies as "real" work. I am only in it again because I can use it to help do some "real" work that I am interested in and the Arduino type tools are much closer to the configurable software I chose all those weeks ago. The lies that are getting swapped in this thread are remarkably similar to my own fables of the past:)

73,

Bill? KU8H

bark less - wag more

On 3/25/21 1:28 PM, Arv Evans wrote:

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
?

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