In case I forgot to mention, anyone who wants to share project ideas, or is looking for some interesting, if not useful projects, I have a BASIC Stamp Projects page located at:
I found this discussion fascinating, and it brought back some fond memories. Many posts ago (on 8/6), Chris asked if anyone has built a simple cpu from descrete parts. I build cpus from descrete parts before Intel brought out the 4004. I made 16 of them with TTL ICs, NAND gates, flip-flops, counters. I used diodes for the microcode, but moved up to ROMs (the kind with little internal diodes that you burn to get a "1"). The ROM let my program grow from 16 program lines to 256. I used it in a product to calculate mx+b to vary controller setpoints based on sequences of straight line segments. I interfacted it to a Texas Instruments TMS 0117 calculator chip. That calculator chip became the industry benchmark for the slowest chip on the marked!
It was nice when the 6800 came out, 'cause I could do the programming in assembly language and I could do the testing using a Motorola development kit. The development kit had 680 bytes of RAM, and I added 2048 bytes using descrete 1-bit memory chips. I thought that would be good enough, but I just couldn't fit a hand-coded floating point math routine; I was about 6 bytes short. I used an Amdahl timeshare computer and Motorola cross assembler to do the programming. I would type "dump," then I would quickly switch the RS-232 plug from the teletype to the development board and the Amdahl would download the hex code.
The first commercial-off-the-shelf computer I ever used was a PDP-8. S/N 1 or 2. I think they added an RS-232 interface after s/n 3. Before then it was a hardwired teletype machine. We used paper tape. We had to toggle in a RIM loader in octal using front panel switches to get it to recognize the tape. We used it to record temperature from a thousand thermocouples. This replaced an earlier system that recorded temperatures on punched cards, which we took to an IBM 360 for tabulation. The PDP allowed us to do the printout right on the teletype, and, later, on our new HP 1000.
My first home pc was a coco, which had a 6800 and then a 6809. I got an assembler from a Hot Coco magazine contributor and programmed all kinds of stuff for a year. A year later I read the instructions and found out that it had a decent BASIC interpreter built-in. I didn't think the BASIC would let me mess around with the hardware enough, but it did!
I still have the Motorola 6800 development kit. I looked at it when I got my first BASIC STAMP a few days ago. My 13-year-old asked if the BASIC STAMP was the same thing. Well, it is, but with the on-board BOE, I don't have to solder while developing stuff, it comes with powerful built-in functions, and I don't have to switch the RS-232 cable from the keyboard to the STAMP to download programs and read data!
·· Now you see, I never had that kind of motivation to build a CPU from discrete parts!· In fact, I spent months learning how to build a Power Amplifier from discrete parts, and when I finally had it figured out, I found an SK integrated amplifier IC, and went with that...Been doing that ever since...Call it lazy, but I always try to cut my part count down whenever possible...
Anyway, congrats and welcome to our old-school tech-talk thread!
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Knight Designs 324 West Main Street P.O. Box 97 Montour Falls, NY 14865 (607) 535-6777
I got the motivation to build a cpu from descrete parts because microprocessors weren't invented yet, and computers were tens of thousands of dollars. We were thinking of putting the design onto a custom IC, but when Intel and Motorola came out with theirs, we switched to COTS (commercial off the shelf) microprocessors.·I have this distain for designing and building stuff that can be purchased.·I want to buy·it when I can, and·develop it when I can't. That's what I like about STAMPS!
Dennis mentioning that coco brought back memories of my own first personal computer.
I'm not sure if I'm "old-school", but I certainly feel that way [noparse]:)[/noparse]
While I've owned a wide range of computers in my time, from a TRS-80 Model 1 to a·monster 2.4ghz tower w/every bell and whistle, and everything in-between, my fondest computing memories stem from a birthday present from Grandma.
The year was around 1984, I·was eight or nine years old, it was a coco2, with 64k of mem, tape drive storage,·8 amazing colors, a screen resolution of 256x192, and an expansion bay for games or peripheral add-ons.· It had·built in Extended·Color·BASIC rom that it booted up into after only a measely 2 seconds after powering up.· After I had exhausted everything I could possibly think of with BASIC, I started really messing around with the PEEK and POKE statements.· What a wonderful world opened up before my eyes!· I had powers never before imagined with BASIC.· I wrote a RAM-scanning program that would show me the values stored in all the locations from 0 to 65535,·modified it to show me ASCII, and that's when the glimpses into the mind of the beast appeared; I saw BASIC keywords, never-before-seen error messages, recurring matrices of characters as the screen scrolled which I discovered to be the video RAM area,·and many other wonders.· It occured to me that if·I scanned a smaller portion of the memory at a time, I might could catch some real live action, so I wrote a short program that would scan small sections of memory repeatedly, looking for·changes.··To make a very long story short, in the end I found I could·control every bit of hardware just by poking·bytes into key locations, without even knowing what those bytes represented, just going by trial and error.· Eventually I bought a 286 with a hard drive, and took the coco apart to make a burgler alarm.
Of course this was the kindling that lit my passion for everything I love today.· Thanks Grandma for buying me that computer, it made a world of difference [noparse]:)[/noparse]
·· I guess "Old School" really covers quite the range in my eyes...And here's the reason...Computers haven't been around that long.· In fact, in all the technological progress we've made, I think it's all happened in around 50 years.· So it's no surprise there are people on here who were computer before computers...And there's people like me who consider myself an Old School hacker, simply because I was working with the VIC-20, Apple II, and COCO computer when they first came out.· You can't be too far behind me, as in 1982 I was around 12 years old!· I had alot of electronics experience, but everythhing I knew about computers at that point was from books.
·· You know, this reminds me of something we did a few years back...Anyone who know Jeff Foxworthy can appreciate this...My BBS (Yes, REAL Dial-Up Bulletin Board System) used to have a "sub" called "Old School Hackers", and one time I invited everyone who thought they fit to add their own line to our "Grafitti Wall" (Don't know if any of you remember those!)...And it started out as:
If your first computer had less memory than your wrist watch, you might be an Old-School Hacker!
This was, of course followed by all the people who went on and added their own, like:
If you could PEEK and POKE, and weren't talking adult, you might be an Old School Hacker!
If your first storage media was leftover blank cassette tapes, you might be an Old-School Hacker!
And this went on...I wish my memory was as good as my computer's, cuz there were some doozies...People who had me beat hands down...But you get the idea.
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ Chris Savage
Knight Designs 324 West Main Street P.O. Box 97 Montour Falls, NY 14865 (607) 535-6777
In 1965 or 1966 when I was a high school student in the ham radio club, the whole club got hired through someone's connections to help disassemble a computer at Andrews Air Force base in Maryland. Our job for most of the day was to pull out vacuum tubes from never-ending row upon row of modules. The tubes were horizontal, tight together in modules, and I remember having cramps in my hands at the end of the day. Someone told us the computer had had to do with ballistics calculations, or it might have been part of the SAGE air traffic tracking system, a network of computers that predated the internet. Each SAGE computer had about 50000 vacuum tubes and drew a whale of a lot of electrical power, and used a redundant design so that tube burnouts would not bring down the whole system. Anyway, at the end of the day, I got to take home a power supplies for one of the modules, and today cleaning out a shelf I found it there--photo attached. (I hate to throw things away).
...370-0-370 volts @ 270 mA
...235-0-235 volts @ 40 ma
...5Vct @3 amps
...5V @ 2amps
...6.3Vct @ 7 amps
...6.3Vct @ 3 amps
... swinging choke, 2 henry at 270 ma
There were hundreds of these power supplies, and each power supply would support fewer bits than we have in a BASIC Stamp RAM. Each bit was a flip flop that required one dual triode tube. I read in one internet reference that a good thing about tubes was that you could troubleshoot by turning out the lights and just look for a burnt out filiment. Now there were some old school hackers!
That cpu that·I built from descrete parts was made from solid state -- integrated circuits, no less, so I think Tracy has me beat. Heathkit had an analog computer on the market when Apple IIs came out. My father used to maintain an analog·computer at Hughes Aircraft Company. It was made from nuvistors, which are miniature vacuum tubes. That analog computer was in use until 1977 to plot satellite orbits and related calculations. Hughes patiently waited until digital computers became accurate enough. Before then,·analog computers were more accurate than digital computers when performing millions of sequential calculations because digital roundoff errors exceeded analog drift.
It took me a lot longer than Mad Tweaker to discover PEEK and POKE in the coco. I was so happy to discover that I could write in BASIC and link to my·assembly code. I wonder if anyone remembers the HOT COCO magazine one-line contest. It's amazing to see how much functionality can be put into one 256-character line of BASIC code.
Vacuum Tubes!· OMG!· My old mentor used to be a real "Audiophile" in the strictest sense of the word.· He hated Compact Discs and Integrated Amplifiers, saying they were not only harsh, but mechanical...He had a Tube Amplifier that he built himself using matched tubes from Germany, and he even built the 400 Volt Power Supply using Tubes as well...Pre-Amp?· Yep, it was Tube as well...
Now, the closest I got to using Tubes was my band's Marshall and Peavy Amps that happened to have them, and once, Popular or Radio Electronics (I forget which one) had an article to build a Hybrid Pre-Amp that employed both Solid-State & Tubes into one package allowing the user to mix the two signals.· My mentor back then scoffed at it and said he'd leave the Solid-State circuitry OUT!
Dennis, I don't remember the contest you refer to, but I am curious as to what the winner's one-line of code actually did...·
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Knight Designs 324 West Main Street P.O. Box 97 Montour Falls, NY 14865 (607) 535-6777
Hanging on to vacuum tubes is analogous to hanging on to buggy whips and 7-jewel watches. There is a risk of losing an art and a skill when adopting new technology, so there is a sense of something lost, but, over time, there's no way to stop new technologies that have significant benefits over the old.
It's ironic when new technologies introduce new problems that mimic old problems. Each time I wait for my PC to boot up from cold start, I am reminded of the time when we had to wait 30 secs or more for the tubes in our radios and TVs to warm up enough to hear the music or see the picture. Standby was the instant-start feature of old; instead of saving the system state, we just kept our filaments warm!
I'll look into my archives and describe some of the more memorable one-line contest winners. There were several winners each month, as I recall. I will post some if the copyright owners provide their consent.
Wow.. This thread brought many smiles to me for a variety of different reasons..
The first computer I had gotten was the TI-99/4A. I was very young when we got it.. i would have to say probably in kindergarten? That would have been 1980? Does that sound right? I'm not sure when it came out, actually. Anyways, I had one game that I loved, I belive it was called Tunnels of Doom or something like that. You had the game cartridge as well as a casette. That damn cassette player ate the tape. I was so angry. Never did too much programming of my own... Just typed in the programs that came in the book.
Next I had a C64 and then a C128-D, with the internal 5 1/4" floppy drive. i still have it actually. It was in my parents basement and when I purchased my first home my father brought it over. I didn't even know I still had it. I remember a friend of mine in the 4th grade had a C64 and I used to go over there to play games on it. All I talked about for like 6 months was that silly computer. I almost passed out on Christmas Day when I got the C64 and the 1541. It was heaven! I had then gotten the 300 baud modem and would waste my time on a few local BBS's. My parents didn't quite get it and I often got in trouble for typing up the phone or even running up the bill. How was a 5th grader supposed to know that if you used the phone for hours on end that the phone bill would be astronomical. Throughout high school I pretty much just used the computer for gaming. Never was really into it much more than that and never really played with electronics.
I go to college for nursing and realize my one true love: Programming. I ended up getting a second degree and became a programmer. I have been programming in C/C++/Java for the past couple of years on some pretty interesting projects. The more I do the more I realize that I want to get closer to the hardware. So here I am... 30 years old, getting my third degree in electrical engineering. I never knew that I was this much of a geek.
You fellows are real youngsters.
Computers since 1955 micros since 1974. First was a 8008 homebrew. No kits were available for some time.the other 8 bit micros did not exist then. Printer was a teletype machine.
Wow, this thread still gets a bit of activity even after all this time...If any of you are feeling nastalgic, I was surfing over at www.thinkgeek.com and came across this, which I might actually get:
I think the calenday missed a few. How about the schelbie h-8 which preceased all of those listed as far as i know. The schelbie used the intel 8008 which was the absolute first 8 bit micro chip.
Thanks to IT guy - the forum moderator who seems to have added the "View page 1 2 3 4" hint, I became aware of the fact that this is the most visited, and mostly replied thread in the Sandbox forum. Therefore, here comes my new post...
It is amazing to read how many others made the same experiences that I have made here, across the Atlantic, when I touched the first microprocessors.
This is a (partly) list of the various types of computers I've been hacking so far:
- IBM 360 (this beast needed punched cards for input, and I learned to program it in PL-1 at the university).
- KIM-1 (my first microprocessor-based device) Yea, I did a lot of pencil-and-paper coding at this time because an assembler was not available. BTW not the worst approach (makes you think twice before hacking in code). Today, I can only remember that 0x60 was the opcode for RTS. As Bean mentioned already, cassette interfaces for storing/re-loading programs sometimes could be a nightmare. In the beginning, it happened to me more than once that I could not re-load a peviously saved program. Why? Because the 6502 had this nice decimal flag used to select between binary and BCD arithmetic. Obviously, the cassette firmware did not set this flag to a defined state before writing/reading the tape. So when the flag's setting was altered between save and restore the restore failed because of wrong checksum calculation results. One day, I "hexed in" some code I found published in Byte Magazine, added some parts for a simple ADC conversion, hooked that up to an audio amplifier, and was really amazed to listen to the Star Spranckled Banner in FOUR voices. Imagine - this thing only had 1 K of RAM for data and program code!
- SWTP (South West Technical Products) 6800. My first computer with "Slots" (SS50 = Smoke Signal 50) bus. This one had 16 K of RAM. It took me a while to get used of the "Motorola way" of memory addressing (HOB first, LOB last). First, I used an audio cassette (Cansas City Standard Interface) to store/retrieve data, later, I upgreaded to a double floppy drive with FLEX OS.
- Tandy Trash 80, Model I - this was the first machine that allowed me to put hands on the Z80 and its "relatives", like Intel's 8080 (back to LOB/HOB addressing). I also bought the Expansion box, and several external floppy drives using the first version of TRS-DOS which did not even allow you to re-format diskettes with data. At that time, Tandy was selling a "Bulk Eraser" to "blank" such disks before formatting. I never bought this one and used a strong magnet instead. In order to add printing to the TRS-80, I bought a used IBM Selectric Typewriter (one of the ball-head monsters) with solenoids attached to the five selector bars, and used my good old SWTP 6800 as code-converter/driver. This stuff was installed next to our living room, so you can imagine that my wife sometimes did not really like me.
- Superbrain - a dual Z80 machine with CP/M OS. This was an awfully fast machine, using one Z80 as main processor, and another one for floppy and other I/O tasks.
- ITT 3030 - a machine produced in Germany, using a Z80 CPU, running CP/M OS. This was my first machine with a hard disk with a breathtaking capacity of 5 MB!!! For ITT, I wrote my first book about Microsoft BASIC 80 in German and in English.
- More Tandy TRS-80s: Model II (the business machine (I still have some 8" floppies here), Model III, Model IV, the Color Computer (I translated the docs into German for Tandy), and Model 100, the first laptop I owned.
- Yes, some Commodore stuff as well, like the PET, the C64, and the VC 20, but I never liked these machines too much, although I wrote some software for these machines to generate some income for living.
- Apple II and Apple IIe as well. Actually, the Apples made my first trip to the US a reality. I could spend one week at the MIT where I localized Logo for the Apple II into German language.
While staying in Boston, I also visited the owner of a small publishing company, and there, I saw the first IBM PC. He had one of these machines with two monitors, one for text, and one for CGA graphics, and he showed me Lotus 123. I got really excited about this program (because I only knew Visicalc for the TRS-80 and the Apple II so far, and did not like it too much). He offered to arrange a meeting for me with the people at Lotus in Boston, and I was lucky too meet Mich Capore, and some other people there. When I mentioned that it would be great to localize Lotus 123 for Germany, I was told "We're not interested in international". Seems as if they have changed their opinion since then
- IBM-PC XT - This very first one had a 20 MB hard disk (a "little" less than modern graphic cards have on-board in RAM today).
Well I think I could continue this for a while, but I better quit for now before it becomes boring...
One final story:
While in my "KIM-1 phase", I found a TI application note describing how to build a video terminal interface with tons of TTLs and dynamic RAMs. I wire-wrapped this one, and found out that it consumed several Amps @ 5Volts. When I hooked it up to a commercial video monitor, it was out of vertical and horizontal sync. After adjusting the monitor's "VS" (vertical sync) pot, this direction was stable, but I had no success when trying to adjust the "HS" pot. After some days of trouble-shooting my interface, I remembered the well-known RTFM abbreviation. Reading the monitor's docs, I learned that "HS" did not mean "hoizontal sync", but "high voltage stabilization" instead. Adjusting the "Sine Coil's" ferrite core, immediately caused a perfect horizontal sync, and I've been using this unit for a long time.
·· Not boring, I think it brings out the nostalgic side in alot of us.· I'm surprised you weren't into the Commodore machines much.· I knew many people from Germany in my years on the Commodore end of things, and they were some of the best programmers I ever knew.
·· I myself, preferred the Z80, but the Commodore computers had such good grfx & sound for the time, that they quickly caught my attention.
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ Chris Savage
Knight Designs 324 West Main Street P.O. Box 97 Montour Falls, NY 14865 (607) 535-6777
How about after all this reminiscing and being nostalgic, I ended up bidding on a TI-99/4A on eBay tonight... Not sure exactly what I am going to do with it. I'm sure my girlfriend is going to love it. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
My first experience to computers was my senior year in high school (1980) when my friend invited me over to his house to show me his TRS-80 Model 1 with a lot of mods. I was interested - but the lack of color and poor audio caused me to hold off buying my own computer until 2 years later. In 1982 I purchased a 16K Atari 800 for $665. Being a poor college student - I struggled with the Atari 410 cassette drive for 1 1/2 years before investing in an 5 1/4 inch floppy drive and a 32K memory board. I remember typing in a lot of BASIC programs published in Compute! magazine - and then spending more time trying to find the typo when it didn't work right the first time. I joined a local Atari computer user group right away and faithfully attended the monthly meetings held in the back of a computer store. The group dissolved about a year later and some former members formed a new group called the Jersey Atari Computer Society (JACS) which I immediately joined. I wrote my senior project on the Atari (Solving Mechanical Engineering Problems with a Computer - using a BASIC program to solve Linear Algebra problems). I remember logging into the JACS BBS with an Atari 300 baud modem and was quite pleased how much faster the Avatex 1200 baud modem worked after I upgraded. I bought a number of Atari's over the years - the 520ST with monochrome display (1985), the 1040STf (1987) and the MegaST2 (1988). I stuck with the MegaST2 until 1994 having successfully upgraded the processor myself (which was soldered to the motherboard) and OS to TOS 1.4 and paying a shop to upgrade the memory to 4 MB by soldering 16 RAM chips to the motherboard. I stayed active in JACS for years, becoming the President in 1986 and Treasurer in 1987. While I was President we had some 200 members, and the membership completely filled the Arts and Crafts center where we met and swapped disks. I met a nice woman there (Norma) who I started dating in 1988 and married in 1992. Our first 'date' was an Atari computer festival in Maryland.
I started playing with the Spectre GCR Mac emulator for the Atari around 1991 and bought my first Apple Macintosh in 1994 - a Centris 660AV with a 25 MHz 68040. Over the past 10 years, Norma and I have bought too many Macs too count and my current machine is a 1.33 GHz PowerMac G4 running OSX 10.3.
My computer experience has come full circle because I just got done building my new 'gaming rig'. It's got an 8-bit Microchip 10 MHz PIC16F84 (overclocked to 12 MHz), 1156 bytes of on-chip RAM, 2 Atari compatabile joystick ports and it can play 2 games - Pong and Tetris. But you'll need to swap chips to play the other game. I also had to solder together the PIC programmer. The PIC Game System features 2 bit video (black and white) and 1 bit audio.
I consider it hardcore because I had to print, etch and drill the circuit board and then solder it all together. It's all mounted in a 4 x 4 x 2 inch white plastic case. Total cost was about $25 (and that includes one processor for Pong and one for Tetris). The PIC programmer cost me $8.50. It works well, but I can't take credit for designing it. The PIC Game System was designed by Rickard Gunee at http://www.rickard.gunee.com/projects/video/pic/gamesys.php
·· Two things in your post stuck out in my mind...First, COMPUTE!· I had all but forgotten that magazine, which is interesting considering that when I first started getting it, I had both an Apple IIe AND a Commodore 64.· It was interesting to type in the programs on BOTH computers and compare them.· I have to admit, back then it seemed like more work was put into the Apple programs, or at least they seemed to look better.· But over time the Commodore hackers were proving that the C64 could do far more than·what the engineers who designed it ever expected!· But yeah, COMPUTE! is probably what got alot of people started in programming.· For me it was the VIC-20 Reference Guide (Complete with Schematic!).
·· Second thing that stuck out in my mind...Back when I was in the Commodore User Group in Schenectady, alot of us joked around about the effects of being a computer nerd on the family.· As some of the guys had families that kinda suffered from their devotion to their computer group/buddies over anything else.· We even made message tag-lines for them like, "Not tonight honey, I have a modem" and "Break up a family, buy a modem!"· But the underlying theme was that none of these people had wives/girlfriends that were into computers, and in fact, I myself had a woman tell me that "Maybe I should just marry my computer!"· So, getting to my point, it's great that you could meet someone who shares your interests, so you don't have to go through that.
·· Fortunately, my wife, although not into computer/electronics like I am, still respects that this stuff was around long before she was, and let's me do my thing, as long as I don't shut her out.·· Besides, she's into crafts anyway, so...
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Knight Designs 324 West Main Street P.O. Box 97 Montour Falls, NY 14865 (607) 535-6777
I recal the first "computer" I ever made some time in the early '70's was a bread-boarded 8008 with 16 BYTES of ram. It actually flashed a bunch of LEDs.
I also have one of the oldest Shugart hard disks around, still brand-new in the box, never powered up. Must have been a 12 inch platter; cant remember the capacity, but surely not much. I think it cost around $2500.
There was no controller for it, so we actually had to sign a waiver stating that we understood this was "complicated stuff", and if could not get it running, the supplier was not responsible, we were on our own in new territory.
By the time we got around to looking at using this thing, the technology started to move more quickly, and it sort of got forgotten.
Wow. Old school. Hmmmm. Schenectady, NY. Well let's see. GE was there. GE Research and Development.
Niskayuna High School had a thing with Union College where they had terminals to the main frames in the mid-sixties.
Cool. I started with the Vic20 and had a Comodore Amiga and those others that came before it. (Now I'm so old I can''t even remember anything anymore.) ROFLMAO...
Amiga had some cool programs - Aegis Draw + which was an awesome CAD program and you could get Cambridge LISP that would run on it (AI).
I was mostly interested in the graphics capabilites of the computers as they were developing.
You could triple pass scan images using a B+W surveillance camera shooting through RGB gels back in the beginning and get a 1/2 way decent color image with the Amiga.
I still have a 1500 that has a hard drive wired to the side so it can do plots from my Roland 6 pen plotter.
Those were the days. There has never been mouse action as smooth as on the Amigas. Period. Not since.
I miss that machine... so powerful, so simple, so easy. Now with Dual heads and Nikon D2H and Epson 2200 printer with archival inks, photography is awesome, but the promise of it all was held with those machines back in the day...
Coding? Oooooh, that's for you guys. My kids ( now in 30's) do that stuff and used the amigas back then and now they make way more money that I do because of it. They definitely are LEET, Sheeeesh, is that what you call it?
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
Designs Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/designs
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
Designs Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/designs
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Sid
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
Designs Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/designs
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http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris/stamps.htm
All are welcome!·
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
Designs Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/designs
·
It was nice when the 6800 came out, 'cause I could do the programming in assembly language and I could do the testing using a Motorola development kit. The development kit had 680 bytes of RAM, and I added 2048 bytes using descrete 1-bit memory chips. I thought that would be good enough, but I just couldn't fit a hand-coded floating point math routine; I was about 6 bytes short. I used an Amdahl timeshare computer and Motorola cross assembler to do the programming. I would type "dump," then I would quickly switch the RS-232 plug from the teletype to the development board and the Amdahl would download the hex code.
The first commercial-off-the-shelf computer I ever used was a PDP-8. S/N 1 or 2. I think they added an RS-232 interface after s/n 3. Before then it was a hardwired teletype machine. We used paper tape. We had to toggle in a RIM loader in octal using front panel switches to get it to recognize the tape. We used it to record temperature from a thousand thermocouples. This replaced an earlier system that recorded temperatures on punched cards, which we took to an IBM 360 for tabulation. The PDP allowed us to do the printout right on the teletype, and, later, on our new HP 1000.
My first home pc was a coco, which had a 6800 and then a 6809. I got an assembler from a Hot Coco magazine contributor and programmed all kinds of stuff for a year. A year later I read the instructions and found out that it had a decent BASIC interpreter built-in. I didn't think the BASIC would let me mess around with the hardware enough, but it did!
I still have the Motorola 6800 development kit. I looked at it when I got my first BASIC STAMP a few days ago. My 13-year-old asked if the BASIC STAMP was the same thing. Well, it is, but with the on-board BOE, I don't have to solder while developing stuff, it comes with powerful built-in functions, and I don't have to switch the RS-232 cable from the keyboard to the STAMP to download programs and read data!
·· Now you see, I never had that kind of motivation to build a CPU from discrete parts!· In fact, I spent months learning how to build a Power Amplifier from discrete parts, and when I finally had it figured out, I found an SK integrated amplifier IC, and went with that...Been doing that ever since...Call it lazy, but I always try to cut my part count down whenever possible...
Anyway, congrats and welcome to our old-school tech-talk thread!
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
Designs Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/designs
·
I'm not sure if I'm "old-school", but I certainly feel that way [noparse]:)[/noparse]
While I've owned a wide range of computers in my time, from a TRS-80 Model 1 to a·monster 2.4ghz tower w/every bell and whistle, and everything in-between, my fondest computing memories stem from a birthday present from Grandma.
The year was around 1984, I·was eight or nine years old, it was a coco2, with 64k of mem, tape drive storage,·8 amazing colors, a screen resolution of 256x192, and an expansion bay for games or peripheral add-ons.· It had·built in Extended·Color·BASIC rom that it booted up into after only a measely 2 seconds after powering up.· After I had exhausted everything I could possibly think of with BASIC, I started really messing around with the PEEK and POKE statements.· What a wonderful world opened up before my eyes!· I had powers never before imagined with BASIC.· I wrote a RAM-scanning program that would show me the values stored in all the locations from 0 to 65535,·modified it to show me ASCII, and that's when the glimpses into the mind of the beast appeared; I saw BASIC keywords, never-before-seen error messages, recurring matrices of characters as the screen scrolled which I discovered to be the video RAM area,·and many other wonders.· It occured to me that if·I scanned a smaller portion of the memory at a time, I might could catch some real live action, so I wrote a short program that would scan small sections of memory repeatedly, looking for·changes.··To make a very long story short, in the end I found I could·control every bit of hardware just by poking·bytes into key locations, without even knowing what those bytes represented, just going by trial and error.· Eventually I bought a 286 with a hard drive, and took the coco apart to make a burgler alarm.
Of course this was the kindling that lit my passion for everything I love today.· Thanks Grandma for buying me that computer, it made a world of difference [noparse]:)[/noparse]
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"OIOOIOOO OIIOOIOI OIIOIIOO OIIOIIOO OIIOIIII OOIOOOOO OIIIOIII OIIOIIII OIIIOOIO OIIOIIOO OIIOOIOO OOIOOOOI"
Post Edited (DntGvaSht) : 9/11/2004 7:45:00 AM GMT
·· I guess "Old School" really covers quite the range in my eyes...And here's the reason...Computers haven't been around that long.· In fact, in all the technological progress we've made, I think it's all happened in around 50 years.· So it's no surprise there are people on here who were computer before computers...And there's people like me who consider myself an Old School hacker, simply because I was working with the VIC-20, Apple II, and COCO computer when they first came out.· You can't be too far behind me, as in 1982 I was around 12 years old!· I had alot of electronics experience, but everythhing I knew about computers at that point was from books.
·· You know, this reminds me of something we did a few years back...Anyone who know Jeff Foxworthy can appreciate this...My BBS (Yes, REAL Dial-Up Bulletin Board System) used to have a "sub" called "Old School Hackers", and one time I invited everyone who thought they fit to add their own line to our "Grafitti Wall" (Don't know if any of you remember those!)...And it started out as:
If your first computer had less memory than your wrist watch, you might be an Old-School Hacker!
This was, of course followed by all the people who went on and added their own, like:
If you could PEEK and POKE, and weren't talking adult, you might be an Old School Hacker!
If your first storage media was leftover blank cassette tapes, you might be an Old-School Hacker!
And this went on...I wish my memory was as good as my computer's, cuz there were some doozies...People who had me beat hands down...But you get the idea.
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
Designs Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/designs
·
...370-0-370 volts @ 270 mA
...235-0-235 volts @ 40 ma
...5Vct @3 amps
...5V @ 2amps
...6.3Vct @ 7 amps
...6.3Vct @ 3 amps
... swinging choke, 2 henry at 270 ma
There were hundreds of these power supplies, and each power supply would support fewer bits than we have in a BASIC Stamp RAM. Each bit was a flip flop that required one dual triode tube. I read in one internet reference that a good thing about tubes was that you could troubleshoot by turning out the lights and just look for a burnt out filiment. Now there were some old school hackers!
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Tracy Allen
www.emesystems.com
Post Edited (Tracy Allen) : 9/15/2004 4:13:09 PM GMT
It took me a lot longer than Mad Tweaker to discover PEEK and POKE in the coco. I was so happy to discover that I could write in BASIC and link to my·assembly code. I wonder if anyone remembers the HOT COCO magazine one-line contest. It's amazing to see how much functionality can be put into one 256-character line of BASIC code.
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"OIOOIOOO OIIOOIOI OIIOIIOO OIIOIIOO OIIOIIII OOIOOOOO OIIIOIII OIIOIIII OIIIOOIO OIIOIIOO OIIOOIOO OOIOOOOI"
Now, the closest I got to using Tubes was my band's Marshall and Peavy Amps that happened to have them, and once, Popular or Radio Electronics (I forget which one) had an article to build a Hybrid Pre-Amp that employed both Solid-State & Tubes into one package allowing the user to mix the two signals.· My mentor back then scoffed at it and said he'd leave the Solid-State circuitry OUT!
Dennis, I don't remember the contest you refer to, but I am curious as to what the winner's one-line of code actually did...·
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
Designs Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/designs
·
It's ironic when new technologies introduce new problems that mimic old problems. Each time I wait for my PC to boot up from cold start, I am reminded of the time when we had to wait 30 secs or more for the tubes in our radios and TVs to warm up enough to hear the music or see the picture. Standby was the instant-start feature of old; instead of saving the system state, we just kept our filaments warm!
I'll look into my archives and describe some of the more memorable one-line contest winners. There were several winners each month, as I recall. I will post some if the copyright owners provide their consent.
The first computer I had gotten was the TI-99/4A. I was very young when we got it.. i would have to say probably in kindergarten? That would have been 1980? Does that sound right? I'm not sure when it came out, actually. Anyways, I had one game that I loved, I belive it was called Tunnels of Doom or something like that. You had the game cartridge as well as a casette. That damn cassette player ate the tape. I was so angry. Never did too much programming of my own... Just typed in the programs that came in the book.
Next I had a C64 and then a C128-D, with the internal 5 1/4" floppy drive. i still have it actually. It was in my parents basement and when I purchased my first home my father brought it over. I didn't even know I still had it. I remember a friend of mine in the 4th grade had a C64 and I used to go over there to play games on it. All I talked about for like 6 months was that silly computer. I almost passed out on Christmas Day when I got the C64 and the 1541. It was heaven! I had then gotten the 300 baud modem and would waste my time on a few local BBS's. My parents didn't quite get it and I often got in trouble for typing up the phone or even running up the bill. How was a 5th grader supposed to know that if you used the phone for hours on end that the phone bill would be astronomical. Throughout high school I pretty much just used the computer for gaming. Never was really into it much more than that and never really played with electronics.
I go to college for nursing and realize my one true love: Programming. I ended up getting a second degree and became a programmer. I have been programming in C/C++/Java for the past couple of years on some pretty interesting projects. The more I do the more I realize that I want to get closer to the hardware. So here I am... 30 years old, getting my third degree in electrical engineering. I never knew that I was this much of a geek.
Anywho.. Just thought I would add my $0.02
Computers since 1955 micros since 1974. First was a 8008 homebrew. No kits were available for some time.the other 8 bit micros did not exist then. Printer was a teletype machine.
73
spence
k4kep
then w9qni
http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/accessories/70f2/
It's the 2005 Classic Computers Calendar!
Features such notable computing classics as: [*]Jan - Commodore Pet 2001 [*]Feb - Atari 400 [*]Mar - Sinclair ZX81 [*]Apr - Texas Instruments TI-99/4A [*]May - IBM PC 5150 [*]Jun - Commodore 64 [*]Jul - Apple IIe [*]Aug - Enterprise 128 [*]Sep - Sony Hit Bit 75 [*]Oct - Apple Macintosh [*]Nov - Atari 1040 STf [*]Dec - Commodore Amiga 500
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
Designs Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/designs
·
I think the calenday missed a few. How about the schelbie h-8 which preceased all of those listed as far as i know. The schelbie used the intel 8008 which was the absolute first 8 bit micro chip.
73
spence
k4kep
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
Designs Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/designs
·
73
spence
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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax
Dallas Office
Thanks to IT guy - the forum moderator who seems to have added the "View page 1 2 3 4" hint, I became aware of the fact that this is the most visited, and mostly replied thread in the Sandbox forum. Therefore, here comes my new post...
It is amazing to read how many others made the same experiences that I have made here, across the Atlantic, when I touched the first microprocessors.
This is a (partly) list of the various types of computers I've been hacking so far:
- IBM 360 (this beast needed punched cards for input, and I learned to program it in PL-1 at the university).
- KIM-1 (my first microprocessor-based device) Yea, I did a lot of pencil-and-paper coding at this time because an assembler was not available. BTW not the worst approach (makes you think twice before hacking in code). Today, I can only remember that 0x60 was the opcode for RTS. As Bean mentioned already, cassette interfaces for storing/re-loading programs sometimes could be a nightmare. In the beginning, it happened to me more than once that I could not re-load a peviously saved program. Why? Because the 6502 had this nice decimal flag used to select between binary and BCD arithmetic. Obviously, the cassette firmware did not set this flag to a defined state before writing/reading the tape. So when the flag's setting was altered between save and restore the restore failed because of wrong checksum calculation results. One day, I "hexed in" some code I found published in Byte Magazine, added some parts for a simple ADC conversion, hooked that up to an audio amplifier, and was really amazed to listen to the Star Spranckled Banner in FOUR voices. Imagine - this thing only had 1 K of RAM for data and program code!
- SWTP (South West Technical Products) 6800. My first computer with "Slots" (SS50 = Smoke Signal 50) bus. This one had 16 K of RAM. It took me a while to get used of the "Motorola way" of memory addressing (HOB first, LOB last). First, I used an audio cassette (Cansas City Standard Interface) to store/retrieve data, later, I upgreaded to a double floppy drive with FLEX OS.
- Tandy Trash 80, Model I - this was the first machine that allowed me to put hands on the Z80 and its "relatives", like Intel's 8080 (back to LOB/HOB addressing). I also bought the Expansion box, and several external floppy drives using the first version of TRS-DOS which did not even allow you to re-format diskettes with data. At that time, Tandy was selling a "Bulk Eraser" to "blank" such disks before formatting. I never bought this one and used a strong magnet instead. In order to add printing to the TRS-80, I bought a used IBM Selectric Typewriter (one of the ball-head monsters) with solenoids attached to the five selector bars, and used my good old SWTP 6800 as code-converter/driver. This stuff was installed next to our living room, so you can imagine that my wife sometimes did not really like me.
- Superbrain - a dual Z80 machine with CP/M OS. This was an awfully fast machine, using one Z80 as main processor, and another one for floppy and other I/O tasks.
- ITT 3030 - a machine produced in Germany, using a Z80 CPU, running CP/M OS. This was my first machine with a hard disk with a breathtaking capacity of 5 MB!!! For ITT, I wrote my first book about Microsoft BASIC 80 in German and in English.
- More Tandy TRS-80s: Model II (the business machine (I still have some 8" floppies here), Model III, Model IV, the Color Computer (I translated the docs into German for Tandy), and Model 100, the first laptop I owned.
- Yes, some Commodore stuff as well, like the PET, the C64, and the VC 20, but I never liked these machines too much, although I wrote some software for these machines to generate some income for living.
- Apple II and Apple IIe as well. Actually, the Apples made my first trip to the US a reality. I could spend one week at the MIT where I localized Logo for the Apple II into German language.
While staying in Boston, I also visited the owner of a small publishing company, and there, I saw the first IBM PC. He had one of these machines with two monitors, one for text, and one for CGA graphics, and he showed me Lotus 123. I got really excited about this program (because I only knew Visicalc for the TRS-80 and the Apple II so far, and did not like it too much). He offered to arrange a meeting for me with the people at Lotus in Boston, and I was lucky too meet Mich Capore, and some other people there. When I mentioned that it would be great to localize Lotus 123 for Germany, I was told "We're not interested in international". Seems as if they have changed their opinion since then
- IBM-PC XT - This very first one had a 20 MB hard disk (a "little" less than modern graphic cards have on-board in RAM today).
Well I think I could continue this for a while, but I better quit for now before it becomes boring...
One final story:
While in my "KIM-1 phase", I found a TI application note describing how to build a video terminal interface with tons of TTLs and dynamic RAMs. I wire-wrapped this one, and found out that it consumed several Amps @ 5Volts. When I hooked it up to a commercial video monitor, it was out of vertical and horizontal sync. After adjusting the monitor's "VS" (vertical sync) pot, this direction was stable, but I had no success when trying to adjust the "HS" pot. After some days of trouble-shooting my interface, I remembered the well-known RTFM abbreviation. Reading the monitor's docs, I learned that "HS" did not mean "hoizontal sync", but "high voltage stabilization" instead. Adjusting the "Sine Coil's" ferrite core, immediately caused a perfect horizontal sync, and I've been using this unit for a long time.
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Greetings from Germany,
G
·· Not boring, I think it brings out the nostalgic side in alot of us.· I'm surprised you weren't into the Commodore machines much.· I knew many people from Germany in my years on the Commodore end of things, and they were some of the best programmers I ever knew.
·· I myself, preferred the Z80, but the Commodore computers had such good grfx & sound for the time, that they quickly caught my attention.
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
Designs Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/designs
·
I started playing with the Spectre GCR Mac emulator for the Atari around 1991 and bought my first Apple Macintosh in 1994 - a Centris 660AV with a 25 MHz 68040. Over the past 10 years, Norma and I have bought too many Macs too count and my current machine is a 1.33 GHz PowerMac G4 running OSX 10.3.
My computer experience has come full circle because I just got done building my new 'gaming rig'. It's got an 8-bit Microchip 10 MHz PIC16F84 (overclocked to 12 MHz), 1156 bytes of on-chip RAM, 2 Atari compatabile joystick ports and it can play 2 games - Pong and Tetris. But you'll need to swap chips to play the other game. I also had to solder together the PIC programmer. The PIC Game System features 2 bit video (black and white) and 1 bit audio.
I consider it hardcore because I had to print, etch and drill the circuit board and then solder it all together. It's all mounted in a 4 x 4 x 2 inch white plastic case. Total cost was about $25 (and that includes one processor for Pong and one for Tetris). The PIC programmer cost me $8.50. It works well, but I can't take credit for designing it. The PIC Game System was designed by Rickard Gunee at http://www.rickard.gunee.com/projects/video/pic/gamesys.php
·· Two things in your post stuck out in my mind...First, COMPUTE!· I had all but forgotten that magazine, which is interesting considering that when I first started getting it, I had both an Apple IIe AND a Commodore 64.· It was interesting to type in the programs on BOTH computers and compare them.· I have to admit, back then it seemed like more work was put into the Apple programs, or at least they seemed to look better.· But over time the Commodore hackers were proving that the C64 could do far more than·what the engineers who designed it ever expected!· But yeah, COMPUTE! is probably what got alot of people started in programming.· For me it was the VIC-20 Reference Guide (Complete with Schematic!).
·· Second thing that stuck out in my mind...Back when I was in the Commodore User Group in Schenectady, alot of us joked around about the effects of being a computer nerd on the family.· As some of the guys had families that kinda suffered from their devotion to their computer group/buddies over anything else.· We even made message tag-lines for them like, "Not tonight honey, I have a modem" and "Break up a family, buy a modem!"· But the underlying theme was that none of these people had wives/girlfriends that were into computers, and in fact, I myself had a woman tell me that "Maybe I should just marry my computer!"· So, getting to my point, it's great that you could meet someone who shares your interests, so you don't have to go through that.
·· Fortunately, my wife, although not into computer/electronics like I am, still respects that this stuff was around long before she was, and let's me do my thing, as long as I don't shut her out.·
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
Designs Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/designs
Post Edited (Chris Savage) : 12/19/2004 3:34:45 PM GMT
Wow, what a lot of nostalgic memories.
I recal the first "computer" I ever made some time in the early '70's was a bread-boarded 8008 with 16 BYTES of ram. It actually flashed a bunch of LEDs.
I also have one of the oldest Shugart hard disks around, still brand-new in the box, never powered up. Must have been a 12 inch platter; cant remember the capacity, but surely not much. I think it cost around $2500.
There was no controller for it, so we actually had to sign a waiver stating that we understood this was "complicated stuff", and if could not get it running, the supplier was not responsible, we were on our own in new territory.
By the time we got around to looking at using this thing, the technology started to move more quickly, and it sort of got forgotten.
Lots of fun recollecting how things have changed.
Peter
Niskayuna High School had a thing with Union College where they had terminals to the main frames in the mid-sixties.
Cool. I started with the Vic20 and had a Comodore Amiga and those others that came before it. (Now I'm so old I can''t even remember anything anymore.) ROFLMAO...
Amiga had some cool programs - Aegis Draw + which was an awesome CAD program and you could get Cambridge LISP that would run on it (AI).
I was mostly interested in the graphics capabilites of the computers as they were developing.
You could triple pass scan images using a B+W surveillance camera shooting through RGB gels back in the beginning and get a 1/2 way decent color image with the Amiga.
I still have a 1500 that has a hard drive wired to the side so it can do plots from my Roland 6 pen plotter.
Those were the days. There has never been mouse action as smooth as on the Amigas. Period. Not since.
I miss that machine... so powerful, so simple, so easy. Now with Dual heads and Nikon D2H and Epson 2200 printer with archival inks, photography is awesome, but the promise of it all was held with those machines back in the day...
Coding? Oooooh, that's for you guys. My kids ( now in 30's) do that stuff and used the amigas back then and now they make way more money that I do because of it. They definitely are LEET, Sheeeesh, is that what you call it?
ROFLMAO!!!!
Cheers -
/\rt