Vintage Computer Festival Shows Off Ancient PCs 229
Markgor writes "Just finished looking through some pictures from the recent Vintage Computer Festival in Marlboro, Massachussetts, the first time that it's been held on the East coast. The best pic has to be the one of the Sol-20. Here in Ottawa, we have a bunch of vintage computers sitting in one of our museums, including an Altair, but I haven't seen an intact Sol-20 in a long long time"
On-line computer museum at UVA (Score:1)
My favorite [virginia.edu] is the vacuum-tube unit they use to store ONE decimal digit of data...
more haiku (Score:1)
like the golden leaves of Fall
let them rot in peace
don't forget them luggables (Score:2)
I remember the strange looks I'd get in the in the NYC Subway with my early Compaq as some people thought I was bringing a sowing machine along. Or how about that steel encased Kaypro ... mine had 2 floppy drives & 64k !
Still, the best example of showing my grey hairs is a working Heath-Zenith portable I've got in the basement. So much fun going through airport security with a device that took 10 AA batteries!
Re:don't forget them luggables (Score:1)
Looking at the pictures it's amazing to think that in 20 years the weight of a laptop has shrunk from 15lbs to... 14lbs?
They got me a Compaq Portable, never a real screamer, but the 2x5.25" drives by the green phosphur screen were very useful. It was such a delight to transport it places (Not!). We eventually used it as a serial bus analyzer, where it did fine duty till it died in late 88.
As old laptops go, the best of an early breed was the Tandy/Radio Shack T1000. It had a vast 320x240 pixel screen, NiCad's that lasted just long enough for you to walk away from the recharger, and a heaving great 80c88. Wow, powwa!
Oddly we used this laptop in late 1987 to do downloads across a network to update databases in a real time control system. How many patents do you think this would fubar?
Before Altair ... (Score:1)
It had ASR-33 teletype (with paper tape punch for "persistence"), HP card reader, DICOM cassette tape (3 bays), Centronics Loud and Unreliable printer. And a whopping 8K of core (on a board the size of today's Intel motherboards).
I wrote BASIC games on punch cards for awhile then started machine language programming directly on the HP using the front buttons for bit input.
Standalone dump was the first useful program I wrote there I think.
When the Altair came out later, it blew my mind to think that an individual could own their own computer
I have a nice photo of the system as a momento (sitting at the office) plus the original HP manuals sent to me by Dr. Sweet of GEAC.
We used to call him long distance and heckle him for info. So one day he got fed up and mailed me all docs for the HP. What a great guy!
Wierd Cromemco isnt mentioned. (Score:2)
Granted they weren't home computers but labeled as minicomputers but they ran Cromix (a really lame version of Unix) the 79 and 82 versions ran on Z80 processors (Yes processors... you could put multiple processor cards in the card cage and run up to 4 at one time) but used that damned 8" floppy for storage. or had a 12" platter hard drive at a whopping 2.5 meg (The 1982 unit)
The 1985 Unit was coolest of all, it used a 68000 processor (DIP packaging just like the TI-994a!) and had a funky RLL/MFM drive. I doubt it was origional though, as the drive controller card had a 1987 dat stamp on it... so it might have been a retrofit.
I hated to leave them behind in 1992 but I couldnt physically get them out of the basement (All but the 1985 unit weighed about 250-300 pounds, and that didn't include the 8"floppy drive caursel changer drive... My first taste of Unix was Cromemco+Cromix, no wonder I have always despised DOS/Windows...
Output device with over 500 ft/lbs of torque (Score:2)
It's not much different than the computers you're all calling obsolete, aside from the fact that I don't have to worry about a display or keyboard (or even storage devices). My I/O are the sensors and actuators of the Navistar-International 7.3L Turbo Diesel "Powerstroke" engine [internatio...livers.com]. The current production version will attain 275 HP and 520 ft/lbs of torque in a Ford F350 with a manual transmission.
How's that for an output device?
So... is anyone else still making a living programming these "obsolete" computers?
Classic Mac's make great clocks (Score:2)
Re:Classic Mac's make great clocks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Classic Mac's make great clocks (Score:2)
feeding the fish, neither appeal to me
Re:Classic Mac's make great clocks (Score:2)
Just one small bit of advice to you little neo-yuppie punks who think that when you mutilate and destroy a classic computer to build a fish tank, refrigerator, submarine, petting zoo, etc...
You're not creating a historic or collectable item; you're destroying one. If you find yourself talking to a classic computer collector, *do*not* brag about your penchant for destruction. It may cost you your life. IOW, we don't really like you people!
Re:Classic Mac's make great clocks (Score:1)
Another SOL? (Score:2)
It Just Isn't Fair!!! (Score:1)
Vintage computers in Austin (Score:3, Informative)
Preserving the good old days (Score:1)
Apple II
Apple II+
Apple IIe
Apple III
Sinclair ZX-80
TI-99/4A
Laser 128EX (currently a game machine hooked up to a 27" TV and surround sound)
Unitron clone (Apple II/II+ functionality - heck, it's probably worth something now)
Yoink!
Older machines and emulation (Score:1)
The classic open source example is MESS [emuverse.com], but there are lots of other emulators out there.
Windows and Unix users should check Retrogames [retrogames.com] and Zophar [zophar.net], and Mac users should check emulation.net [emulation.net].
I have an abacus (Score:2)
I can scratch little marks in the dirt with a stick.
I have fingers and toes.
Beat that ya pussies!
My first....Atari 800XL (Score:2)
64 K of ram
1050 Tape Cassette Drive
Weird Assed printers....
and what I think STILL are the best Joysticks...ATARI joysticks took a licking and kept on ticking (until you broke the ring off....then just go buy the internal stick in the store, open it up and replace it).
You Whippersnappers (Score:2, Troll)
Z
Re:You Whippersnappers (Score:1)
My first! A Poly88, from Polymorphic Systems. Orange, with a white front and a yellow reset button. It's remains are around here someplace...
Re:You Whippersnappers (Score:2)
Oh, wow, that takes me back.
I have two Sol-20s, a Helios drive, and (I think) a Shugart 5.25" floppy drive and controller board. The controller has some bad buffers, I think, as the board has to be just so or it won't read the disks.
Currently, all this hardware is sitting in my garage, rusting away from benign neglect. I haven't powered any of it up in over seven years.
Did you get the music interface board? This consisted of a small card that plugged into the S-100 bus, which tapped out exactly two lines: INTE and ground. Thus, by setting and clearing the interrupt disable bit in tight loops in the 8080, you generated a pulse-width modulated wave which was fed to an amp and resulted in music. For a 1MHz machine, it was damned impressive. I still have that program laying around somewhere.
What I'd really like to have is a copy of Steve Dompier's aside in the GamePak manual, concerning the "violent" nature of Target.
Schwab
Re:You Whippersnappers (Score:3, Funny)
Vintage is not always a good thing (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Vintage is not always a good thing (Score:1)
*grin*
Re:Vintage is not always a good thing (Score:2)
I beg to differ! In the early 70s, toggling in a boot loader on the front panel switches of your PDP-11 was considered mundane and detestable. Today, many collectos live for that very activity. I know because I'm one of them; I'm currently restoring a PDP-11/20 (ca. 1970) so I can do exactly that.
Proof that Computers Get Better With Age (Score:3, Funny)
Unlike wine, computers do not get more potent with age.
I beg to differ. Here's a picture of the 32K RAM expansion card (and a few other cards) in a 1981 Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Peripheral Expansion Box [glowingplate.com]. Yes, they're clad in cast aluminum. Yes, the steel chassis is stamped of far thicker metal than the unibody of a Toyota Tercel.
On the other hand, I could beat someone over the head with a stick of SDRAM, but it would be more memorable to the DIMM than to the individual requiring the physical behavior modification.
Re:Proof that Computers Get Better With Age (Score:2)
I used to have a TI-99/4A...first computer I had at home. TI pulled out of the computer business about six months after we got it, though, so it never got beyond 16K and the hideously slow (double-interpreted?) built-in BASIC. I wonder if things would've taken a different track if we had gotten the expansion box and all the goodies for it...but we bought an Apple IIe (with 128K, a DuoDisk, and an Imagewriter) two years later and I ended up shifting most of my activity to that machine.
Maybe someone has a TI up on eBay or whatever for not much...it'd be nice to have one again, just for the hell of it. If all the goodies (more RAM, the enhanced BASIC cartridge, etc.) are also available with it, that'd be a bonus.
Getting somewhat back on-topic, that expansion box is an impressive beast...makes even my Apple II stuff look somewhat wimpy by comparison. Definitely from a time when men were men and sheep were scared...or something like that. :-)
Why TI BASIC was so friggin slow (Score:3, Informative)
The reason it was so slow was that the 16K it used was the video chip RAM. This is esentially the same chip used in the ColecoVision (except Coleco for some bizarre reason used the RGB version and an RGB video to RF modulator!) In order to use this RAM, you have to tell the video chip the address, then you can read sequential data bytes from it. This is an I/O operation, rather than a normal memory operation. Everything must have been stored out there, including the program and variables.
I learned how slow it was one day when I saw one powered up in a store. I hit the RETURN key and the thing took a whole second of thinking before it did the nothing that I asked it to! That's right, it took a whole second just to do nothing!
When you had a PEB or sidecar RAM, that was in the 64K address space of the CPU, and I've heard that BASIC would know to use that instead. Of course TI discouraged any non-PEB expansion, so sidecar options were only used by the tech savvy. (And not many tech savvy folk went with the TI in the first place.)
The main units (and about two dozen different cartridges) were very common back in the mid 90's when I was collecting classic video game stuff. Except for the old non-A version with the chiclet keyboard, that is. It's the goodies that will set you back.
Re:Proof that Computers Get Better With Age (Score:2)
Maybe someone has a TI up on eBay or whatever for not much...it'd be nice to have one again, just for the hell of it. If all the goodies (more RAM, the enhanced BASIC cartridge, etc.) are also available with it, that'd be a bonus.
Where are you located? E-mail me back.
Re:Proof that Computers Get Better With Age (Score:2)
Re:Proof that Computers Get Better With Age (Score:3, Funny)
And when you are 10 years old with one of those things(PEB), they are a royal bitch to carry around.
Tell me about it. I was the buffest ten-year-old on the playground, with bigger biceps and triceps than most of the bullies, and I thank Texas Instruments for that.
A good marketing lesson here (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A good marketing lesson here (Score:2)
Real Computers... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real Computers... (Score:1)
This would have been better attended... (Score:2, Informative)
Marlboro is in a good location, particularly since eastern Massachusetts is largely considered to be the Silicon Valley of the east coast. Being a resident of MA and working in the industry, I would have expected someone at the company I work at to have heard about it and reported it.
That particular hotel is a nice little joint too...and it's a stone's throw off I-495.
It almost makes me want to recover the Apple
Re:This would have been better attended... (Score:1)
Re:This would have been better attended... (Score:1)
This was a relatively quiet event. Now that we know it'll work, I expect that a ton of us locals will do our best to get the word out next time. I know I will.
You had a RamWorks?!?!? (Score:2)
] call -171
* 1F 2A 16 37 FF 4C BA
Re:This would have been better attended... (Score:3, Informative)
The MA show was the first "East Coast" (VCF East 1.0 [vintage.org]) version of VCF, and if attendance at the San Jose VCF 3.0 and 4.0 (and projected 5.0) is any indication, VCF East has a bright future ahead of it. Just give it a year or two.
Re:This would have been better attended... (Score:1)
holy moly (Score:2)
i sold junk at a swap meet while working through college -- some guy saw an old pc i was selling and gave me the altair.
i hope to someday get them running again, each was running when retired, plus i have most of the manuals.
Re:Osborne (Score:1)
Mine "disappeared" many years ago, but I still have the big beasty itself...
Processor Tech Sol (Score:4, Interesting)
Correction, machine language... I didn't have an assembler at the time, so I photocopied the 8080 instruction set page (note singlular) and went from there. One side of the page had the opcodes and the hex values, the other had the inverse so you could look up an opcode by hex value.
In the time when everyone was selling their $100 to $500 BASIC, Processor Tech gave away their "5k basic" in source code form. Imagine that
Yep, that was a beauty and a beast. The video card had 1k of RAM, mapped as 64x16. What's interesting about the video is that you could reprogram the character bitmaps so that you could get custom "graphics" on that screen, and a clever programmer could do FAST graphics by changing some critical character definitions at the right time.
Don't forget the Northstar floppy disk system. The disks were hard-sectored, so you couldn't just get the ones from Radio Shack to work. I had to drive to the next town to buy one - and they were $5 each at the time...
(Four Yorkshiremen can start any time now
Re:Processor Tech Sol (Score:2)
Rich did the software, it had a little editor that you'd enter strings like:
0.......
.0......
..0.....
...0....
.0...0..
0...0...
to show the time sequence of which light strings you wanted lit.
OK, it's not exactly rocket science, but we thought it was pretty cool :)
Northstar Horizon (Score:1)
Later upgrades included 32k of RAM (which is, incidentally, half of what the lunar lander had), an additional half height 5.25" hard sector floppy drive, a 8" hard sector floppy drive, a 9-pin dot matrix printer, and
Nowdays, MS recommends 128MB of RAM
Re:Processor Tech Sol (Score:2)
You must be thinking of something else. The only way to reprogram the character set imagery on the Sol was to re-blow the PROM that was part of the VDM circuitry. Besides, the amount of RAM it would have taken to store the character imagery would have been ruinously expensive at the time.
Somewhere in my stack-o-$#!+, I have a pixel-perfect copy of the Sol-20 font bitmap I made for the Mac and the Amiga. If I could figure out how to port it to X and Windows, I would.
Thanks, but I'm still trying to forget their appalling BASIC.
Schwab
Re:Processor Tech Sol (Score:1)
I don't remember the model of the video card (S100), but it DID allow you to program the characters.
And "ruinously" expensive? Assuming 8x8 characters, 256 of them will only take up 2k, or 8 2112 chips. Even 8x16 chars would take up "only" 4k.
Re:Processor Tech Sol (Score:1)
Didn't many of the original Sols only have 4k of memory? I remember when ours got its first 16k memory card - we were in fat city!
Re:Processor Tech Sol (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Processor Tech Sol (Score:2)
-russ
I remember... (Score:3, Funny)
Yep, those were the days.
Re:I remember... (Score:1)
Re:I remember... (Score:1)
Wayne
Re:I remember... (Score:3, Funny)
A transistor? A transistor? You LUCKY BASTARD. When I were a lad we had to switch currents with our teeth, and only when a wire marked "gate", which was shoved up me arse, went live with over a kilowatt.
took up half your backyard.
Half your back yard? You LUCKY LUCKY BASTARD. Ours took over t'town, and town next door. And it were so heavy that people making tide tables used to have to come to me mothers' door and ask where t'computer would be on such and such a date.
Dave
How is the parent of this a troll? (Score:1)
SOL-20?? (Score:2, Informative)
It was a great deal of fun sitting down with the manual and a copy of creative computing typing in the programs and learning at the same time. My favorite games that came with it were Trek-80 and target (a shooting gallery type game).
For some links to PT stuff try out the following:h Sol20.htm [geocities.com] c =344 [old-computers.com]
http://www.geocities.com/~compcloset/ProcessorTec
http://www.corestack.com/machines/sol.html [corestack.com]
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?
and for an SOL-20 emulator: http://thebattles.net/sol20/sol.html [thebattles.net]
I also learned to program in 8080 assember, and played with focal and anything else I could find included with it.
The one we had had a dual drive Helios II 8" floppy drive. ... you slide the disk most the way in and it would "suck it in", and you would push a button and it would whirr and eject the disk. A bad think to do with these was to was to grab the disk as it was still being ejected ... would as often as not cause the drive to jamb. ... the drives sounded like somebody bouncing on an old bed when they were busy seeking.
These things were the oddest drives I've seen. They had motorized eject and loading
The other odd thing about the drives is that both drives had their heads mounted to a single voice-coil positioner
Enough reminicing from an old fart computer geek!
- subsolar
I used to work in Ottawa... (Score:4, Informative)
Boston (Score:1)
I visited Boston for the first time at the end of last year. I had a few days spare, so the Boston Computer Museum [tcm.org] was an obvious visit. Finding that it had been absorbed into the Museum of Science [mos.org] wasn't too bad, but what happened to all the exhibits ? Shipped out to storage in California [computerhistory.org] and "... The Best Software for Kids Gallery(TM), now part of an expanded Cahners ComputerPlace". - Just as you describe, it had been reduced to a trivialised version of MSN.
I've a better computer museum in my own shed 8-(
OK, so the Virtual FishTank [virtualfishtank.com] is excellent, but that's an exhibit on behaviours, not on computer history.
obkarmawhore: Not quite computers, but immensely cool electrical oddities [electricstuff.co.uk].
Nobody here knew of the show! I swear! (Score:2, Interesting)
If I had known about the show, I would have dragged along some of my old equipment, and some other stuff that people have around work. I've got a fully functional Atari ST, with mouse, external scsi drive, monitor, and all kinds of MIDI software...hook it up to my synths and I could have put on quite a show! Maybe I would have found someone there with a copy of Epoch UNIX too....a co-worker of mine has an old Epoch server board, that just needs a copy of the OS to run. Anyone here know where I can find a copy of Epoch UNIX?
You think your hard drive is loud (Score:2)
Re:You think your hard drive is loud (Score:2)
Re:You think your hard drive is loud (Score:1)
The drives themselves aren't noisy (nice quite belt drives, IIRC). What is noisy is the
One of them (I forget which) has a 1hp electric motor (yes, I know how big a motor that powerful is - definitely 1hp, about 1.3kW) which drives a huge blower and a hydraulic pump. Seems to pump stuff resembling Citroen LHM fluid through an oil cooler (cooled by the blower, among other things) and into the mysterious bowels of the unit...
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:1)
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:1)
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:1)
Incidentally, I was using ARCNet cards and scavenged TV coax cable back then. Boy, 100mbps ethernet is sure an improvement!
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:2)
I wrote a screen saver for it, because my dad's other computer had one on it. I talked about it in class and my teacher thought I was lying about it, and made me write a note to my mom about how I lied to the teacher and shit. My parents got pretty pissed at her, because I hadn't been lying. She never did like me, though.
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:1)
Someone said something about tech teams, well at my old high school there were two guys, me and one of my friends. The sysadmin had to not only cover the highschool but every other school in our district, so he pretty much left the highschool in our hands. We computer techs pretty much had a pass out of every class if we wanted it. We were also given pretty much free reign over the highschool webserver. We had the only linux based web server(for educational purposes) within 50 miles. Those were the good old days when we could play frisbee with cds down the main hall, and the principal would just say hi.
This is our world! So get the F*ck out!! (Score:1)
Small minded people only trust people that the government/buisiness tells them are important. Otherwise, everybody is equal, (satire) And equality's for commies! Everybody *CANNOT* do whatever they put their minds to! Only people ordained by GOD to have skills on these magic boxes can do anything, and that only takes effect when they're 25.(End satire)
and don't get me started on how The education system demands people to think the way their teacher tells them, and follow not the rules set in place, but the "don't piss off the teacher -- he/she is *ABOVE THE LAW*" rule...
I've gotta stop writing, or I'll be here all night ranting about how bad school is for intelligent people.......
speaking strictly from experience, of course...
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:1)
The real problems came when they were getting computers decent enough for people to DO things with them. This led to kids like me and several friends of mine MUDding and other such tripe (ahh the glory days...when you could lag for 4 minutes and it was considered "normal")
And then we had a kid send a joke email threat letter to the president and all hell broke loose
Anyway that's my semi-amusing anecdote/rant for this week! Tune in next week for the same dose of crap!
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:2)
Good thing too, Linux needs an MMU. Multics might go though.
Dave
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:2)
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:1)
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:1)
Not only can a lot of us do that and breadboard it, but we can write the Boolean expressions, as well.
You have to remember, you're hangin with a bright crowd.
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:1)
So there's at least one person here who could draw it, and I'm willing to be there are others. Just because there are a decent number of MS Visual Basic "programmers" out there doesn't mean that the real kind have vanished.
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:2)
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:2)
BASIC, as you knew it, was an interpreted language.. You were LOAD".."'ing, were you not?
Oh, and the 386 never hit 66.. That was a 486.
If you ever want to try your hand at Linux on it, might drop me a line. I've done it a couple times..
Re:How about an IBM XT with a working CGA monitor! (Score:2)
Re:So here are all the oldies (Score:1)
Re:You don't call youself old without one of these (Score:1)
I've got an Apple Mac Plus, and another in the mail (through ebay). It's amazing how flexible those babies still are. (tcp/ip over ppp to access www, etc)
Re:You don't call youself old without one of these (Score:1)
Re:You don't call youself old without one of these (Score:1)
Hey, did I say listed are shit?
If you do think that way, you are insulting the rest of them too.(j/k)
In fact they were remarkable computers at time. Many are still working well. My ATARI 400 is still running very smooth.
Re:You don't call youself old without one of these (Score:1)
And it's fantastic way of colouring a screen... not by pixel, but by blocks of pixels...
And those tapes... oh the joy... the listening to the screaching, the waiting for minutes on end as the game loaded... the screaming as you got to the end, only to find out it didn't actually load properly... the pleasure of getting out your tiny phillip head screwdriver and adjusting the head of the tape drive while listening to the tape until you heard that it sounded the best, then trying again to load...
Oh damn that was fun...
And the games...
And yes, we still have it.
And a 16K one
Mmmmmm... so many tapes... so many games!
Re:You don't call youself old without one of these (Score:2)
It was much simpler than that. Just press "" and watch the border flip red/cyan, red/cyan, about once a second, until you hit the leader tone.
Another Speccy-owning friend of mine was commenting on how you could *tell* different data by the noise it made loading in. Screen bitmaps had a particularly distinctive sound.
I imagine there are people who had Spectrums from when they were new who could be snapped out of a coma by playing a Manic Miner tape instead of music...
Re:You don't call youself old without one of these (Score:1)
Re:You don't call youself old without one of these (Score:1)
If it dropped in pitch, and the screen came up with vertical stripes, one of the lower 16k chips had failed.
If it stopped altogether, the ZTX650 in the chopper PSU (provided +12v and -5v for the 4116 DRAM's) had gone, change it and all would be restored...
I made a (very) small fortune at school doing this. Either a 4116, the ULA, or the chopper tranny died. Or they bashed seven shades of excrement out of the keyboard membrane playing Hypersports or Daley Thompson's Decathlon...
Re:You don't call youself old without one of these (Score:1)
It was so damn good.
And then if the game actually loaded you had the fun of things like:
Renegade
Avenger
Dustin
Manic Miner
Cookie
Rastan
oh, and just so many, many more...... aaaah
I think I might have to get an emulator to be able to play all those games I have without having to fire up the old girl and battle with the tapes. (oooh, and it'd be actually legal too as I own them... WOW!)
Re:You don't call youself old without one of these (Score:1)
Re:The Score (Score:1)
Re:The first computer I used was an Axel AX-25 (Score:1)
Those were the days...
Re:The first computer I used was an Axel AX-25 (Score:1)
Of course, even before that ('74-'77), I was programming really minimal computers, more like programmable calculators... CompuCorp and Litton/Monroe desktop programmable calculators. I could make those things sit up and beg!
And of course, we had the IBM "bubblecards" (not punch cards) that we sent to the school districts UNIVAC.
Re:Would it be possible to overclock one of these? (Score:2)
Years ago we learned that you could over-clock a 6 Mhz IBM PC-AT to 8 Mhz. You just had to replace the timing crystal, which cost $2.00 at a local electronics shop. The chip speed was actually half the crystal speed, so we were actually replacing a 12Mhz clock with a 16 Mhz clock. sure enough, Norton Sysinfo showed a 25% performance gain.
P.S. the crystal on the IBM MoBos was plug-and-play, no soldering involved. The Morrow might be different, and the system might not handle the speed. But for $2.00 or so, it might be worth a try.
Re:Okay is it just me? (Score:2)
Re:Okay is it just me? (Score:2)
Really? Where do you keep the infinitely-long paper tape? ;-)
Re:Anybody remember OSI? How about the Cosmac? (Score:2, Interesting)
71 Disable
30 90 BRANCH PC+90
F8 08 Load Immediate 08 Put Low R3
A3 Set P = Reg 3 (I think)
Never heard of it
I wire wrapped my first 1802 from the Popular Electronic's article in (1976-7??). Debugged it by replacing the xtal with a switch and stepped it one machine state at a time..
I bought an OSI "Super Board" (no case of course) for $279.00 from a local vendor and made a channel 3 modulator from a 7504 a coil and a variable cap.. Screwed up every tv the entire apt. complex..
I wanted a comadore PET at the time but the darn price was too high.
I did port microchess from the KIM-2 listings and used the OSI character set to create a "visual" chess (that was fun)
My first real computer job was doing 8008 assembler using a asr 33 teletype to papertape and burning the code into 1702 EEPROM's (256 bytes ea.) but was able to leverage my 1802 knowledge to change jobs and work on an real "blue and white" COSMAC. I still have the COSMAC with dual 8" drives in the attic somewhere..
Some kids have no idea about the joy of figuring out the difference between indexed-indirect and indirect-indexed on a 6502.
chuck
Re:Anybody remember OSI? How about the Cosmac? (Score:2)
That was the COSMAC ELF and the chip was the RCA 1702, right? You could get 'toy' ones with a hex keypad and an LED display and maybe 1K of RAM?
Jeez, I remember learning 'indexed-indirect' and 'indirect-indexed' but senility has kicked in and I can't remember what the hell they mean :)
Free Zenith Monitors, FOB Toronto, Canada (Score:2)
Hey! Two of those Zenith Data Systems monitors [wired.com] are sitting in my garbage right now. They both work!
Want 'em? Come scoop 'em, they're at the curb. 1352 Victoria Park Avenue, Toronto, halfway between Eglinton and St. Clair on the west (southbound) side of the road.)
More Free Vintage Computer Junk! (Score:2)
Oh yeah, I've also got 4 1981-era Electrohome/Mitsubishi 13" RGB color monitors. There are two color demodulators (for CGA use, or with Apple IIs or TI-99/4As or whatever), and I put together a sync inverter to make them run with Amiga 500/1000/2000 machines. Matching set of 4, and as I recall, three of them work. They're not at the curb yet, but if you want them, e-mail me. FOB Toronto, Canada.
Re:can I help? (Score:2)
BTW, RT-11 is *not* BASIC-like..