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Hardware

Vintage Computers on the New York Times 98

Posted by Hemos from the i-still-love-my-trash-80 dept.
tomreagan writes "The New York Times has a good article on vintage computers. It talks about a wide variety of the old beasts and is quite exhaustive. It makes me proud to admit that my favorite computer is still my first, a trusty Apple IIc. " Free login required, natch.
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Vintage Computers on the New York Times More

Vintage Computers on the New York Times

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  • Yeah, I remember the VIC-20. I did more in 3.5K than most people do with their 256 node beowulf clusters.

    Actually, I loved my VIC and wrote a stunning BBS system for the C64. Those were the days! When a 5.25 inch floppy was a status symbol.
  • Archon did rock ... but I must say, by far, the best game ever was M.U.L.E.

    I still think of the soundtrack and get all teary-eyed over it. Boom boom buh buh boom ...
  • Well, you could always hook up some oscilliscopes to the o-scope outputs on the left side of the SYMs and do it with vector graphics! Forget about those inferior, new-fangled, raster graphics. ;-)

    mike
  • If old mchines interest you try out

    http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~alexios/MACHINE-ROOM /

    It's the most complete list I have seen. They are also interested in donations if anyone is wants to free up some space but can't bring themseleves to dumpsterize their old machine.

    I personally have 2 signifigant old bits of iron that I refuse to part with....a TRS-80 Model 100 (the original laptop) including the basically unknown Disk/Video interface (the original docking station) and the first real PC network made up of an Apple //e, Apple ][+, Apple clone (there's nothing like burning roms to make you feel a hacker) all connected to a Corvus OmniNet with a whopping 125 MB hardrive.

    Anyone else have a OmniNet? Need Software? Drop me a note.

  • Yes, yes, yes.. I will admit that I missed the boat on the glory days. But my first computer was a (this is about the time 286's were kings - if my memory serves me right, 1985-6) Acorn Electron, with a Plus 1.

    My only regret is that I never had anyone to teach me the zen art of programming it.

    As hard as I tried I could never quite figure out how to do much with it. As I had no manuals, only the tape drive and a couple of games.

    I spent /hours/ trying to figure it out. I was over the moon when I figured out how to turn the tape drive motor on and off; it wasn't useful... But I didn't care.

    And I only figured out the most basic of BASIC commands...

    anybody else remember the indirection operators ? and !?

    Wasn't ? print shorthand? ie:

    10 ? "I rule"
    20 GOTO 10

    Or am I getting it and QuickBasic mixed up (my memories a bit foggy, as I never managed to accomplish anything with it - but damn fun)

    Thinking of QuickBasic.. I remember when I figured out that microsoft products sucked (ok, low blow..but it's stuck with me). I wrote a BBS door (Shitty Little Movie Reviewer v1.0b if it happens to still exist..)in QuickBasic 4.5, and it worked perfectly. But it was /slow/ even in local mode. (A 486DX33, was my second computer) Then I ported it (ie: Only changed syntax etc) to Borland Pascal 7.0. And /my god/ it was fast.

    Oh wow... [flashback]

    Does anyone else remember the cheat for Gauntlet on the Acorn Electron?? It would take control of the reset key, so it would just start again when reset, so the only way to get rid of it was to power cycle. But, if you hit reset enough it'd eventually give you 99 bombs and 99 lives... Oh wow..and Frogger, and Jetpack.. Man I wish I could've had a decent manual for that baby.

    My only regret is taking to it with a hammer.

  • The first year I got my little 7 year old hands on the PET 2001. It had a huge tape drive. I haven't seen a sexier computer than that one, period.

    I mean come on, you could push the 40 pound beast off a bridge w/o wrecking it.

    Course, around 1986 the joke was that it was only good as a hood scoop for your car, or to hold up the car when you needed to do repairs under it.

    I'd love to get my hands on one of them....

  • Gawd. Now I really have to dig my old CoCo 1 (64K, 2 floppy, OS/9 and a CoCo 3 keyboard) out of the garage and set it up. Sounds like I've been out of the loop for a helluva long time. Where is there more information about this kinda stuff?

    Meow-wow!
  • My first two machines were an Atari 400 and 800. I paid $400 for the 400 and $1300 for that 800 (with 40 column printer, external disk drive, 40K RAM -- used). I even wrote a video game for it. Sometimes I remember that first 400 and get a little nostalgic -- then I remember that Fred still has it ... he paid me $250 for the bare Atari 400 and maybe a Star Raiders cartridge. If I ever get too sad I can always buy it back. ;)

    BTW, Star Raiders rULeS!!
  • Good old Beagle Bros. I really miss them. And, yes, I have my "PEEKs, POKEs, and Pointers" chart safely packed away with my Apple II.

    We need something along the lines of Beagle Bros. today. The Linux community somewhat reminds me of BB and "Open Apple" (remember that? I have all of them somewhere too!), but there's no sense of fun in it anymore. Even the Open Source movement doesn't have the same attitude towards sharing your findings and tips with others.

    Oh for better days. :-)

  • I've set up just such a system lately myself. You'll want dt (from www.macbsd.com) for virtual consoles, and hfsutils for that all-important access to your MacOS partition.

    Someone has/had a Mac Plus running a web server; can't remember the URL but I do recall it got Slashdotted.

    -- Dirt Road

  • It is a shame that kids nowadays can't get that kind of a thrill from coding on a machine - heck, it seems like only until recently that they didn't even have anything to code with on their machines (maybe QBASIC). Some kids today seem like they wouldn't have the patience to code anyhow.

    That's why they're all a bunch of script kiddies. :-) I used to write all kinds of stuff for a variety of different computers--my grandfather's CoCo, the TI-99/4A that was the first computer I had at home, and the Apple IIe that pretty much replaced it a couple of years later.

    One project I wrote for a proficiency-badge project was a math-drill program that spoke everything to you, as well as displayed it. I combined some digital-audio software cribbed from Nibble with lots of samples copied to a RAM disk and some BASIC code to tie it all together. The other kids were impressed at the program that talked. Looking back, though, the use of the full 128K of memory in the computer for something so relatively trivial might have been an early incidence of bloatware. :-) (The samples weren't even that great...some were of my voice and some were from my sister's Speak'n'Spell.)

    (Explanatory note: I'm an Air Force brat; we were in England at the time (1984-86). I was in one of their Boy Scout troops while I was there...a different experience. Proficiency badges are roughly equivalent to the merit badges in our system.)


  • The Apple //e was on Apple's price list until 92 or 93. (I remember seeing that it had a strange model name like "//e+ enhanced" and had grown a keypad on the case and had 3.5" disk drives!) Apparently schools and the like were still buying them.

    In any case, it was only officially cancelled when Apple released a //e card for Mac LC models.
    --
  • I remember my Grandpa had built a Nybbler out of a kit from Digi-Key (the electronics distributor) back in the 70's. Back then, nobody had heard of Digi-Key, except for us, since my mom used to work there. We don't have the Nybbler anymore, since my grandpa died in 1984, and most of his electronics equipment (like his homebrew oscilliscope, and the Radio-Electronics TV Typewriter) got thrown out. I still have his TRS-80 Model III, tho... (It needs a new video tube! Anyone have one?)

  • Neet (Score:2)

    by drwiii ( 434 )
    I still have my C64 and 1541s hooked up at home (the 1541s having self-added toggle switches to let me switch them between device 8 and 9) and still power it up on a regular basis. I was heavily into BBSing until I started getting into the internet, and I remember staying up late reading RFCs and other tidbits through an 80-column(!) terminal program on my C64 (I think it was NovaTerm..) This was before the whole WWW thing hit and people will still using Gopher to pass stuff around. You haven't lived until you've used Gopher at 1200 baud. (:

    I started out at the age of 4 with a VIC 20 (ding! a whole 4K of ram!) and haven't looked back since.

  • I ran a BBS on a C64 (and later an Amiga and even later an XT) for years named the Enchanted Toilet in Southern New Jersey, US. The original BBS on C64 had two whopping single-sided 1541 5.25" floppy disk drives, and the BBS (C-Net) was written in BASIC. It rocked. The Amiga version ran on Citadel-68K and had a wire-wrapped HDD interface built from a kit that drove a humongous 30MB RLL Seagate ST238 disk drive. I later cheated Seagate by adding an ST225 (MFM) in RLL mode to get 30MB out of a 20MB HDD. This setup also rocked. The XT version also ran on Citadel (Cit/86), but who cares about hardware on a PC-compatible.. I don't even remember what it had.

    Christ, who knew about the Internet? We were just happy to get Atari ST's and Apple II's talking to one another then... I guess I lifted a couple passwords and dialed in to Rutgers to get on IP-connected MUDs, but what the hell did I know? All I knew is that this stuff was kick-ass. And as you can tell, they're still trying to pry me out of my cathode-ray-basked desk chair today.
  • Plus, SYS64760 to reset. :)

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Sinclair? A mere toy! Commodore? An overrated US import!

    No, if you wanted true elegance and clean design you were running an Acorn. I still have my old Acorn Atom, with its 1MHz 6502 and 12Kb of RAM... In fact, with the floating point and toolkit ROMs I bought for it, that machine had more ROM than RAM!

    Granted that the black and white graphics weren't that cracking (256x192 pixels), but you got a built-in mnemonic assembler and one of the most impenetrably elegant BASIC dialects on the planet (anybody else remember the indirection operators ? and !? Remember the neat way you could add an offset to a base address? A?X = 0;... hmmm). No wonder I'm fond of Perl.

    Classic, classic days...
    --

  • No one loves the old ones more than me and the posts have given me some great ideas but let's not forget that there are new users everyday who are getting MS windows (basic) on their machines and start hacking around and then start saying "I need to get an assembler" and then when they find out how much it will cost will ask one of you old hands (wonder what the definition of that is now? maybe 25 years old? lol) what can I get to hack around with and you will ask them "Have you looked at Linux?" and they will be in their "golden age" of computing. Thank goodness that the 8 bit machines were that because having no net access meant if you wanted some info you had to call someone or go buy a book then get in vehicle and drive..I bet with net access you can do in a week what it took months to do back then. Sure was glad when those 300bps modems came out. I have said that since windows came out that folks who start with windows and use nothing else will be at a bad disadvantage. The virus troubles of late are good examples. Last night when I rebooted in Debian I remembered this article. I get the same pleasure out of Linux that I remember from the Commodore days. I'm not a windows basher. If I had to start a network with a ton of keypunchers I would probably link windows desktops to Debian servers.
    Waddle on!
    Shadow
  • Archon did rock ... but I must say, by far, the best game ever was M.U.L.E.

    I still think of the soundtrack and get all teary-eyed over it. Boom boom buh buh boom ...

    As a big time Commodore nostalgiac (I run a web page [d.kth.se] dedicated to it), I have to comment that Wizball happens to be the best C64 game out there.

    It took the computing power of three Commodore 64s to put a man on the moon. It takes the computing power of 1000 Commodore 64s to run Microsoft Word. Something is wrong here, and it ain't NASA.

  • I've still got my first computer (KIM 1) and someday I intend to hook it to the web. It would be cool to craft up a tiny (1k) server that offered up some kind of statistics page. I can still remember most of the 6502 opcodes!

    Along with the KIM I've also got a SYM I. With a whopping 4k of RAM!

    Man, I feel old.

    mike

  • I still have an AIM-65 somewhere around the house. I bought it while in college, and used it for quite a few projects. I bought the FORTH-in-ROM for it and wrote a dice-roller program that made our weekend Dungeons and Dragons sessions a little easier to deal with for the DM.

    Amazing, the stuff we used to do with 4K of RAM.

    -- Dirt Road

  • Until Linux I always did prefer my Apple, because no matter what I wanted to do it was possible. If I was unhappy with how a program was functioning, I hacked it. Or rewrote it. Even though it was simple, it was still challenging. My favorite challenge in those days was to re-implement a game that I had played myself, and modify it to include features I wanted.

    Although this is not an Apple story, I once wrote a program to draw a color hires picture of the Ghostbuster's logo, on my CoCo. I wrote it in basic and it took me the better portion of a day, (Probably about 5 hours or so) This is before I had a tape drive or disk drive (Disk drive was too expensive and tape drive was unreliable) Anyway, my mom pointed out that it was a shame I could not save the picture. I said to her, "It's okay, next time I'll be able to do it faster." My point is the journey was more important than the result. Had I needed to draw the picture again I could have done it in less time, and less code.

    Computers nowadays are fun, just not the same kind of fun. It's a shame the kids have to miss out on it.

    -Rich
  • If I remember rightly, speccies were still going till the early 90's. The Spectrum had a very long life, in it's various guises.

  • Lots of fun to be had at:

    Blinkenlights Archaeological Institute [blinkenlights.com]: lots of really old (60s/70s and earlier) tech - I learned a lot.
    Obsolete Computer Museum [ncsc.dni.us]: Broken down by system - everything from the Sinclair ZX80 to the MicroVAX.

    /plug

  • Yes! I miss my Model I TRS-80 so much, I'd give anything [almost] to have it again. Anyone else remember 128x48 resolution? Blinking asterisks while loading programs from tape? The thrill of upgrading the hardware so the machine can display lower case letters? (I thought they were so cute!) The memory upgrade from 16K to 64K? Making 5 1/4" floppies double sided with a hole puncher?

    Ok, so I need to get a life... back to my PII 400, 21" 1600x1200 display, and 256M of RAM... %-)
    ----------

  • Don't we see the obvious possibility here? Port Linux to the 6502 [mcw.edu] processor! That would cover the Apple II series, Commodore 64 series, and countless others.

    There's no protected mode, so it would have to be an ELKS [soton.ac.uk]-like beast.

    Heck, I could even provide archive space--how big could a distro for 64K RAM and 140K disks be?

    Greg

  • Well, well, another Citadel Sysop. I ran The Chalet in St. Paul, Minnesota for four years or more on my XT. There was a tremendous glut of Citadels here in the twin cities (home of Hue Jr!) back in the early ninetys.

    There are still quite a few of them up, but it is very hard to fire up the modem anymore. But whenever I get the urge, there are telnet versions of the software now (with Web front-ends!).

    Elsewise, if I ever happen upon a second phone line, I've still got all my Cit86 software and door games biding time on my hard drive.
  • Use the middle button to open the link in a new window. Then hit ESC or the stop light if necessary, and see if it's obvious what is wrong with the link. In this case, it's just an extraneous quote at the end. Backspace oer it, hit ENTER, and away you o.

    I also use this for some of the freshmeat links, where either there has been a new release and the "old" one from freshmeat is invalid, or where the freshmeat si simply "lastest-xyz.tar.gz" and I want to know the version number of the download, not just latest.

    --
  • A guy in my town (St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada) had a BBS running on C64 for a loooong time. It was still up when I stopped BBSing and got Internet access ('92).

    There's a thread of much relevance to this story in the current voting discussion (I was involved of course).

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid =ostime&cid=70 [slashdot.org]

    Wow, a /. crosspost...
  • I thought was cypherpunk:cypherpunk
  • While I'm not sure I'd go as far as writing a Windows-like OS for a C64 like the fellow mentioned in the article, I do appreciate the old computers, and have a few vintages around yet, although not of the sort mentioned in the article.

    I've got a Mac Plus (with a whopping 4 megs of memory) that I use exclusively as my "phone book" of frequently called numbers, and a 512K (with a Mac Rescue upgrade card no less) that serves as a message board of sorts.

    Although it isn't in constant use, I still have the Atari 800 that I learned to code BASIC on, and two 800XLs as well that I occasionally haul out to play video games with.

    It's kinda odd, but I never would have though about using these again if it hadn't been for Linux -- it's brought back the fun in computing that I used to enjoy with those old machines.

  • Oh no... Started with a TI4/a, then got into Atari 8-bits, with an 800 that I paid $600 for (I was like 11). I had 3 more 8-bits, made my own joysticks too. Then the ST's, 2 of those, RAM upgraded through days of hard labor. Now my PC's video card has more RAM than my first 8 machines combined, and what do I do? EMULATE MY FIRST 7 MACHINES. Atari ruled, get over it. 8 bit Atari had 256 colors onscreen and stereo sound, 16 bit Atari's had Midi ports and through those 32 machine networked video games! Atari's are STILL used by many Midi musicians, how many post production guys still use a Toaster that isn't a PC addon?

    Flame ON! Just kidding...
  • I bought a Mac Plus for $5 to use as a clock in my office. I liked it so much I now have 3 including an SE/30 that i'm going to run netbsd on.
  • Unfortunately, the NYT article really only covers the middle-years "commercial" home computers. The kind you could buy as a finished product at a department store.

    When I read the lead above which said it was comprehensive, I was hoping it would at least bring up the S-100 stuff, and the really cool old hardware. But it was an article for mass consumption, so it didn't mention anything that you couldn't bring up by hooking up a TV set and plugging it in.

    Personal Computer Hackers back then (to make the distinction from the cool stuff being done on things like BSD in University labs) were burning their code into EPROMs, hacking the BIOS and bootloader to get CP/M to load, etc. You had to own a soldering iron to get very far. Consumers were buying the machines that came in injection moulded plastic cases.

    I still have a pair of SYM-1's (6502) and a BigBoard (Z-80). Sold my Altos 586 (it ran a five user version of Microsoft Xenix on an 8086 processor with 512K of RAM) to a collector a year ago.

  • Apple II (Score:3)

    by cje ( 33931 ) on Thursday July 22, 1999 @04:49PM (#1789066) Homepage
    I know how you feel, dude. My Apple IIe is still my favorite computer, too.

    Home computers were just more fun to use back in their infancy. Today they've become so common and mundane that there's no element of exhilaration when you flip the power switch. Back then, the technology was new and so was the experience. Back then, home computer users and hackers were digital conquistadors, exploring a brave new world. Today, we're all suburban commuters, plodding forlornly from one destination to the next.

    The Apple II series was a helluva lot of fun to hack around on. I remember writing raw machine language code (bare hex bytes) in the early 80's because I had no assembler; manually calculating the number of bytes for the destination of a relative branch was a pain in the ass, though. I suppose for that period of time, writing raw machine language was the technological equivalent of punch cards. Every Apple II hacker worth his/her salt will remember what 20 ED FD did (just as every respectable hacker will remember that CALL -151 got you into the machine language monitor. :-))

    Virtually no Apple II hackers thought much of Wozniak's memory-mapping "scheme" for the text/low-resolution and high-resolution screen memory (the old "venetian blinds" effect.) At one time, I had memorized the sequence of hex bytes that implemented the lookup table generator so that you could translate screen lines into memory addresses. This didn't slow things down too much, if you were careful about it, but it was still a bitch.

    I can't be the only one who wistfully misses the days of doing long division and multiplication on an 8-bit processor with no division or multiplication instructions. Oh, and remember all of the undocumented 6502 opcodes? What a great way to make it a bitch for people to disassemble your code and get at the guts. :-)

    Then there was the Disk II. I was once writing a game where fast disk access was absolutely required, and I ended up implementing what amounted to my own operating system (though this was not exactly new; some games like Broderbund's Karateka did exactly this, using spiral tracks to make the disk almost impossible to copy.) Direct access to the Disk II was maddening, painful fun. You had to litter your code with NOP instructions to get the timings on the write exactly right; a microsecond off in either direction and your data is corrupt.

    Show of hands: Who's still got the old Beagle Brothers' "PEEKS and POKES Chart" handy?

    A lot of folks who are new to the whole computing scene don't understand people like us when we so fondly reminisce about the days when computers were slower, bulkier, and harder to use. But it's because they don't understand a very basic concept that so many Slashdotters do:

    Just because it's easier doesn't mean it's more fun.

    Thanks for the memories, Apple.
  • Ahh.. the good olde days of the 64... I got mine when they first came out.. Only had a tape drive.. Didn't get a disk drive for another 2 years.. I still have the receipt for the C64 somewhere (along with the machine).. Programming assembly in Hes-mon.. Playing Raid over Moscow, Racing Destruction Set, Bruce Lee, Elite (best game ever for the 64), Bards Tale, ARCHON (well, ok, this was the best game ever), and so on... Remember using punter to download? AA BBS's? Color64 BBS's, or DMBBS (I ran Color64 and DMBBS for a bit)..I got so far into as to have a 1581, 1541, and a 20Meg CMD HD on my board.. Damn.. the good olde days...

  • The most popular eight-bit computers are the Commodore 64 ... the Sinclair ZX Spectrum ... and the Apple II line, which went on the market in 1977 and became immensely popular for its educational software. Production had stopped for all these models by the early 1990's because of pressure from the I.B.M. compatibles.

    Wait. Did I miss something? I was under the impression that the Apple II lines were discontinued because of the success of the Macintosh line. I'd bet Apple might agree with me too. But hey, it has be true, because a newspaper said so, right? -inco
  • The Video Toaster for Amiga. THAT was a HELL of a unit. I swear, so many people don't believe it, but the Amiga was a machine WELL ahead of it's time, and can even compete with some of today's machines.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • One of my college roomates has TRaSh-80 Color, and I was an Apple ][ man all the way. My roomie once stated that he would know that he was a real programmer when he could write code that would draw the "Hyperspace Jump" effect from Star Wars. I started thinking out loud about random points on the screen, extrapolating from the origin, rate of change, etc.... He immediately started shooting ideas down-- "You can't do it that way, the coordinate system of the graphics screen is all wrong."

    About a week later, I handed him a printout of about 15-20 line of BASIC and said "Look at this and tell me what it does." He wound up keying it in (I did help him translate all the magic numbers having to do with screen width, etc. from Apple to TRS-80--portability!) and running it to find out. "This can't work!" he practically shouted, as the stars streaked out of his monitor...

    Doing something cool for the sake of coolness... those WERE the days.

    kz

  • APL? Alleged Programming Language?

    Damn. but I hated that language. Made no sense unless you read Greek like it was Hebrew.

  • cypherpunks / cypherpunks

    Of course, they could all be right. :-)
    --

  • I used to code Z80 on the ZX81. You had to write your code in assembler, by hand, then look in the back of the manual where they had all the Z80 opcodes listed, and look for the hex that was your instruction. You left spaces for the relative jumps and counted the bytes later. All programs used to start

    2A 0C 40 ld hl, (16396) 'load the hl register with the first byte of the screen array

    When I started using ZASM, the assembler on the RML380Z at school, I was sure it stood for Z80-orgasm.

  • Using Linux after the years of using and developing solely for Windows was the most fun I've had out of playing with a computer since I stopped using my Archimedes, and before that my 8 bit machines.

    Actually having tools that work and which do what you tell them to just makes so much difference!
    --

  • Ok, I had a TRS-80 Model I, then got a model III, and somewhere picked up an atari 800. I miss them all. Anyone else wean themselves on a TRS-80??

    And here's an obscure product I can't believe didn't make it big time -- anyone remember the Exatron Stringy-floppy? In those days [trs80 model I days] a floppy drive was too expensive because you had to buy the expansion module ($200-$400) then get the floppy ($100-$200). For a kid with a paper route to fund his hobby, this was TOO expensive. Exatron came out with a small, credit card sized, fast continuous loop tape cartrages that you would insert into an external box that looked like those boxes for garage security systems. It held much more then a floppy, as was as fast if not faster then a floppy (for sequential access anyway). Beat the 500 baud tapes all to heck...

    Also, anyone remember the "freeware" tape subscription service called "cload"?? For a yearly fee, each month they would send you a cassette tape (the common interface on TRS-80's) of 4-8 programs that were cool. I do miss those simpler times, but on the other hand, I don't..
  • Anyone remember the Tano industrial computers? I picked one up at a General Electric blind auction for 10 bucks back in '86, before I could afford a PC. The thing had an integrated 13 in black-and-white (text only) screen, and a 160K floppy drive. I had no software for it except for the OS. BUT it had a command line to switch the console over to the serial port. I'd hook it up to a 300 baud acoustic modem (auction price: $5) and dial the local BBSs. The fun was that in order to change data bit / stop bits / parity bits settings for each BBS, I would have power down, pull the serial card (about the size of an AT motherboard), change the dip switch settings, put it back, etc. etc. It got served me for a year before I could scrape up the cash for a Leading Edge Model D. By the way, you may want to check out the Large Array of Stale Technology parody at my site [dumbentia.com]. It's pretty relevant to this discussion, I think.
  • Ah, ApplePost. My stepmom used to work for the Computer Store's corporate office in Burlington, MA and ran ApplePost on 14 floppy drives (seven floppy controllers with two drives apiece occupying slots 1-7) hooked up to her machine.

    Don't have a power failure during maintenance...
  • A Sinclare ZX spectrum? Why would anyone want such a fancy machine? My first was a Timex-Sinclare 1000 with the 16k expansion pack and really tiny thermal printer. Computing sessions were limited to what you could squeeze in before the power recitfer under the 4 keypad heated up and made the machine lock up. Ah-yes, the joys of a membrane keyboard and having to press SHIFT and P for Print statements. My first video game on it, Frogger. I remember writing a Christmas list on it as a series of Print statements. Blinking inverted text rules!!
  • Propriety opering systemsm, 300 baud tape transfer, TV montor output, 256 * 192 graphics, assembler programming to do anything good...

    Those were the days...
  • I remember a similar program somebody did - and published it in Rainbow or some such place (maybe Hot CoCo, dunno).

    Anyhow, after typing it in, and seeing what it made - I decided to take it one step farther: I wanted a poster of it for my door! I had a CGP-220 printer from RatShack (it was a rebranded Canon printer - one of the first consumer ink jets, IIRC) - and was printing on leftover 8.5 x 11 copier paper my dad brought home. So I had to write this program to spit the screen up and the send the codes to the printer to basically enlarge the various "sectors" of screen - after it was done, I taped all the pieces up on the wall for all to admire!

    It is a shame that kids nowadays can't get that kind of a thrill from coding on a machine - heck, it seems like only until recently that they didn't even have anything to code with on their machines (maybe QBASIC). Some kids today seem like they wouldn't have the patience to code anyhow.

    One of these days I am going to drag that CoCo back from my parents house and all of my Rainbows, and set me up a similar shrine...

    [sniff]
  • For my CoCo I made a light gun! Interfaced it to the joystick port - had a CDS cell down at the end of a toilet paper tube, focused a lens from a cheesy pair of binoculars on it - wired that up to one of the potentiometer inputs on the joystick port, and made a trigger with a spring from a ball point pen (I am not making this up, I swear!), and wired that up to the button input.

    After all this, I made a "grip" out of cardboard and styrofoam, and masking taped the whole thing together! Wrote some code to bounce a bright white square on a black background, turned off the lights, and had target practice!

    Damn those were good days!
  • You haven't lived until you've used Gopher at 1200 baud.

    Well, I can't say that I have done that - but I have done it at 2400 baud! It was on an Amiga 2000 at the time. But that isn't all.

    Before I go on the Internet, I was BBSing all the way - I started out with 300 baud (and it grates on me about that one commercial for a 56K modem where one kid tell another that 28.8 is tooo slooow...) on my CoCo, then moved to a 1200 baud on a Tandy 1100HD laptop, then to my Amiga 2000 at 2400 baud...
  • The "windows-like" interface they refer to is a project called Wheels, which is a descendant of the old GEOS package, currently called Wheels. I wasn't a big GEOS fan in the day though, and still don't use it... For the same reason that I only fire up X when I need Netscape. For folks that appreciate it, though, it's there.

    So here are a few things the article didn't go into...

    First, the "20 times" accelerator is a neat little device called the "SuperCPU" made by CMD (Yes, the same CMD that used to make the 64 SCSI hard drives). Imagine, a 20mhz C64 with 16 megs of ram... mmm...

    Steve Judd, the guy in the lower picture, is the maintainer of The Fridge [ffd2.com], a "code storage" facility. I got to meet the guy in person last year at an expo [globalpc.net] in Chicago area, and check out the projects he was working on at the time. Very cool stuff, not many folks write a 3d library in assembly ya know.

    For more information on the C64 scene, check out Burning Horizon [burninghorizon.com]'s links page. There really are alot of us left.

    - Squash (previously TFS/FTA)
  • For CoCo 2: POKE 65495,0 to speed up, POKE 65494,0 to slow down.

    For CoCo 3: POKE 65497,0 to speed up, POKE 65496,0 to slow down.

    Remember, slow down before disk or tape access, don't want to mess up your data!

    It is damn crazy that I remember these!
  • anyone remember the Exatron Stringy-floppy

    I don't remember it, but I did come across one not too long ago (maybe 5-6 years ago) at an electronics junk yard here in Phoenix (Apache Reclamation, if anyone cares). It even had a tape in it! At first, I could see what it was supposed to be, and how old it was - but I had never come across it before (when I was a kid I had TRS-80 CoCos, both 2 and 3) in any magazine. After I saw it, I went through a bunch of old Byte magazines I had gotten, and found it.

    Damn interesting piece of hardware!
  • Hell ya! In one of the later issues of Rainbow (just before they went down the tubes!) there was a speed up hack that RECODED the entire keyboard scan system - and sped the computer up like double (add the high speed poke, and get 4x speed!).

    I had one of the video digitizer carts, as well as the speech synth cart. I remember spending a week typing in a basic/hex code loader program, the upshot of which gave you a modifiable font and text+graphics onscreen at once - on a CoCo 2!

    My favorite thing was CBASIC (don't remember the company) - a great BASIC compiler for the CoCo. This thing had my BASIC code running so fast that I had to SLOW IT DOWN! I remember coding my own windowing system, then later getting one from the same company that did CBASIC, that added commands to BASIC to do the same thing.

    My favorite? Had to be Gates of Delerium - it was by this company in Canada - I remember waiting for months for that game to arrive (around the time of a mailworkers strike in Canada), then playing it (was a Ultima clone). I still have Rainbow magazines showing one kind of screen, but when they actually shipped it, it had a different one (more advanced). From what I understand, they were announcing games before they were finished, and advertising them for sale - talk about Vaporware!
  • Actually, there was no such thing as ASR, it is
    actually LSR, or logical shift right. I guess putting
    the lowest bit in the carry just didn't make it
    arithmetical (if that's a word).
  • M.U.L.E. is the best game ever made!!! I still go
    over to a friend's house on saturday nights just to play
    M.U.L.E. I even bought a Commodore for $100 (a few years
    ago) just to play M.U.L.E. I love that game!!!
  • I have an S-100 board. I got it from school (they often throw out all kinds of old gear and software, I have four all tube HP scopes, a 1200 baud modem, a parallel printer switch, a shrinkwrapped copy of OS/2,...). It's digital interface board. The manual has all kinds of example Z80 code in there (I love Z80's, I specified Z180 based boards from ZWorld at a company I worked for a while back, and I love my TI-85 and TI-86 calculators), and there are tons on great parts on it. It's as old as me, actually (1977) but I look at it with awe, thinking things like, "this board was probably *hand-designed*, amazing!"

    Ah, old gear... I got, from a now defunct US military base, a couple of dumb terminals, a few 286s, and a Zenith 10 port serial board (actually two ISA boards, each with a Z80).

    I tried to find out how to get that serial board thing working in Linux but found no info (it was in '94). They were apparently designed specifically for the US navy, and Zenith claimed it didn't even exist when I called them (multiple times, multiple divisions) looking for specs of some kind so that I could write my own driver.

    I'm quite a packrat with that kind of stuff. I have old Commodores, CoCo's, various video game consoles (ColecoVision, Atari 2600 (of course), Intellivision,...). I couldn't pass up a TurboGraphics 16 a few years back. I was at someone's house and they had a Vectrex still in use. I freaked out.

    But I'm more interested in stuff older than I am. If only I had an Altair... sigh
  • One thing I noticed about the article - The gentleman in the photograph seated atop the Commodore 1702 monitor, and telling how he basks in the glow of his C64....is actually sitting on the display of a booted Commodore 128. How do I know? I own 2. :)

    (Behind his head is what appears to be the C64, unless it's a 128 in C64 mode.) If you look carefully, you can pick out the 1541, the 1541C, and a 1581. (Commodore fanatics like me will know what I'm talking about. P.S.: I own all the same equipment.)

    The Era of the Commodore, and machines in the same time period was great. This was a time where owning a computer wasn't too common. This was a time where the most advanced computers in schools were Apple IIgs's. This was a time where writing programs in BASIC was looked at by friends as "Oh man, that's FRESH!" Frankly, I miss those times. Computers back then gave people like me the chance to be different. To be into something that not everyone else was. These days, idiots left and right are buying computers, most of the time not even knowing WHY. At least back then, people who owned computers knew what to do with them and how. There were BBS's (I ran a Commodore BBS for a few years with my brother) where people could talk to one another, and usually, everyone lived in the same city and got together in person every so often. The rapid advances in technology, and the explosion of the internet have blurred all that. We are in an age that computers are nothing special anymore, and being able to use one is less important. That is why it is even more important to cherish those years where computing was special. It still is, but in a very different way. That's why those memories, those machines, and that time is remembered. And I remember fondly.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Not only do I remember poke and peek, but I remember the Poke commands to change screen color on the Commodore 64.

    POKE 53281,X changed Foreground
    POKE 53280,X changed Foreground
    (where X = the cooresponding color on the number keys)

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • You sped up your disk, eh?

    Yeah. What I did was scrap the whole DOS 3.3/ProDOS idea of using 16-sector tracks and just wrote everything on a track in just one long "swoop." Of course, this meant that if you had a tiny file that was only a few bytes long, you'd waste an entire track by writing it. But for my application, each of the "files" I was storing fit pretty conveniently on a track.

    I also used 4 & 4 encoding, instead of the 6 & 2 encoding used by DOS 3.3/ProDOS/Pascal and the 5 & 3 encoding used by DOS 3.2. For those not familiar with the encoding required by the Disk II, there were only certain bit patterns that could be reliably read back by the hardware, so all data had to be "encoded" before the raw bits could be written to the media. "6 & 2" encoding meant that each "byte" written on the media contained six actual "data bits" and two "filler bits" that guaranteed that the bit pattern could be reliably read. The 4 & 4 encoding that I used was (again) a waste of disk space, but it was faster and much simpler to decode.

    Whatta fun time to be a geek. :-)
  • Good God, yes! I've still got my old PEEKs and POKEs chart, the one with the 16 hi-res colors on the back. I also have the Extra K and Pro[Filer|Byter] (can't remember the exact name) disks somewhere for my //c.

    Ahhh, Beagle Bros. Some of the sickest, most twisted AppleSoft code I'd ever seen, from ttheir utilities to their demos to their throwaway extras on the disks. Of course, I had to use it wherever I could. I certainly hope they're all still coding somewhere today. Software should be creative, unusual or just plain funny sometimes. Besides, they were into one-liners almost as hairy as those of the Obfuscated C contests....


    Like another poster, I also had a DecMate for a while courtesy of my dad, a 20+ year DEC employee. RSTS/E, baby. I stayed up all night writing programs to generate TRON-esque printouts on an LA36, the loudest line printer available at the time.

    Of course, now that I'm 28, I'm too old for that sort of nonsense. Why, I can barely stay awake long enough to take my Metamucil and creak my way out onto the front porch rocking chair, where I sit and tell stories about how we didn't have this fancy-schmancy OOP stuff. Why, we were lucky to have a copy of Merlin 8/16... :-]

    ]PR#6
  • The article was severely lacking! Having lived through that period and retained much of the hardware (the software may suffer from bit rot). I remember my first internet access: Rutgers Soup Kitchen (I seem to remember 50 or 60 newsgroups, talk about information overload :-).

    I still have my collection of computers, ZX81 (unassembled and assembled), Z80 Starter kit (gorgeous hand wrapped, handmade Al case and upgraded to 10K). My Atari 800/Ominmon, 600XL, 800XL/256K & Omnimon, Atari 520ST/4M, AT&T 3B1, AT&T 3B2/310, Rockwell Aim, a bunch of Commodore 64's, NEC PC8201A, IBM PC (64K w/cassette ports), a bunch of 8088 clones, a Toshiba 8088 laptop, a Zenith 8088 Laptop, a 286 laptop, AT&T Safari 386SL laptop and now my Linux boxen. I've played with SS30, SS50 and S100, I've built a bunch of different ucontrollers and I still have 3 OS9 and 2 OS9 68K boxes. I have Eval boards for the Motorola 6800, 6801, 6802, 6805, 6808 and 68HC11. I have more but I can't remember what they are. I also had an Apple II but it generated so much RFI I had to get rid of it. My neighbors for 200 feet in any direction would complain and my father was fit to kill me. I love that ROM monitor.

    Those times were great but they aren't as great as things are today. Lets face it the original price of just 1 of those systems can easily purchase an new box. And it seems easy to find an emulator for almost all of them.

    --
    Linux Home Automation - Neil Cherry - ncherry@home.net [mailto]
    http://members.home.net/ncherry [home.net] (Text only)
    http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lig htsey/52 [fortunecity.com] (Graphics)

  • DMBBS by Angelo. God, has it really been that long?

    ARCHON Rocked. Defender of the crown was a bad-ass game too. (The shadows on the walls during the sword fight were AWESOME.) Beachhead II was a great game, karateka (if a bit slow), Strip Poker (heh, ever seen digitized graphics in 16 color?)

    I'm gonna have to boot up my Commodore again, and just mess around. For old times sake.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • M.U.L.E. (Multiple Use Labor Element) was by far the best game ever made for the C64. Who remembers getting a buying all the smithore, then letting the mules loose to drive the prices up? It was a great game that I still occasionally play today when i can find someone to play with. The next most popular games would have to be Summer Games and Impossible Mission 1 & 2
  • Tandy Color Computer. Color BASIC is one of the very few Microsoft programs I've ever actually LIKED.

    OK, nostalgia time: Putting tape over the leads on ROM cartridges to defeat the autoboot, so you can save the contents to tape. Speech/Sound Cartridge ("this is the compyooter speekeying") and having to type in its little 15-line loader so many times I memorized it. Connectix SpeedDoubler in one line: POKE 65495,0 (absolutely the coolest hack on ANY computer ever - doubles your clock speed!)

    Recovering disks by tweaking the GAT directly with a disk zapper (back when file systems were simple enough you had a reasonable chance of success with this). Doing POKEs to change the drive step rate, change the number of tracks, etc. Attaching cast-off TRS-80 Model III floppy drives to the system simply because I could.

    RAINBOW Magazine and open source the way it SHOULD be done - program listings you type in! That really puts the peer into peer review, you don't send your code in to the magazine until you're absolutely, positively, 100% convinced people won't laugh at it or come to your house and kill you for making them type in something stupid!

    Then there was The Upgrade: going to a CoCo 3, finding out 1/3rd of your old games don't work, another 1/3rd are in black and white now, but the rest look FABULOUS on that new RGB monitor. 80 column screens for editing BASIC lines. The disappointingly s.l.o.w Microware BASIC extensions for the new hi-res modes (boxfilling a hi-res screen took 2.5 seconds!).

    OS/9: I've heard it said OS/9 advocates are even worse than Amiga advocates, and rightly so: OS/9 does things the Amiga can't do, Linux can't do, Windows NT can't do, maybe QNX comes close. OS/9 on the CoCo 3 was bragging rights: full preemptive memory-managed multitasking on a 2MHz processor in 512K on floppies. Multiple screen support. Open about 150 shells and hold down "clear" to cycle between them at high speed. Of course, no one mentions you couldn't DO a whole hell of a lot with OS/9, but who cares.

    Sneaky hardware hacks (some of which I have not done): piggybacking RAM chips for the 32K upgrade, swapping the old CoCo 1 keyboard with a REAL keyboard, putting a PC keyboard on a CoCo 3, upgrading to 1MB or 2MB, shaving out the plastic over the power supply for ventilation, installing a SmartWatch RTC onto the floppy controller ROM, replacing that crap floppy controller with a Disto no-halt so you can use HD floppies, adding a RASCAN framegrabber, etc. Replacing the 68B09E processor with a Hitachi 6309 to get about a 5% speedup (the difference between a Pentium 200 and a Pentium 233, I guess).

    Today some sick puppy has written a MOD player and a Wolfenstein-like 3D demo for the CoCo. I hear talk of IDE controllers, Ethernet cards, IP stacks for OS/9, and other such sick hacks. I'd settle for CoCo 3 emulation on my Amiga. :-)

  • XZX (Score:1)

    by Tet ( 2721 )
    Anyone else notice how they claim XZX is a Spectrum emulator for Windows! Oh, and they give the wrong URL for it, too. The correct one has a tilde before the "kunze":

    FWIW, I still remember my early computing days fondly. The Spectrum was fun, and the C64 was excellent (6502/6510 is still my favourite assembler), but it was the Beeb that really shone in my opinion (yes the C64 and Atari 8-bits had better graphics, but the built in assembler made it a joy to work with). Later on, the Amiga had a similar feel to it -- everything just felt right!

  • I have a definite respect for classic Commodore machines, but I was a member of the Atari camp from way back. My first computer was a TI-994A, but the Atari 800XL I got in the 8th grade was a much greater milestone... games like MULE, Jumpman, Shamus II, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, Archon, David's Midnight Magic, Broadsides, countless Infocom games, Star Raiders, Aztec, Montezuma's Revenge, Eastern Front 1941, Ultima II, Gateway To Apshai, Donkey Kong, awww yeah...

    I'll never forget the hours spent programming Atari BASIC, which, unlike the TI, had PEEK and POKE statements (word was Texas Instruments didn't include this because they didn't want people being able to hack their OS). Of course, Atari BASIC had its shortcomings like the lack of multi-dimensional string arrays (i.e. A$[10] pointed to the 10th character in A$, not the 10th subscript of a string array like in any other BASIC).

    It's all about things like the following, which made me a true badass in the eyes of my 8th grade classmates:

    10 GRAPHICS 4
    20 PRINT "AtARI rUL3Z!!!!!!!"
    30 FOR X=0 TO 255
    40 POKE 709,X
    50 POKE 710,255-X
    60 NEXT X
    70 GOTO 30

    I hope I didn't get that wrong, but I'm sure any other old skool Atari people out there will understand what I'm trying to do... :D

  • (literally)

    *tries to remember*

    10 s=54272
    20 poke s+0,0: REM set low frequency
    30 poke s+1,200: REM set high frequency byte
    40 poke s+5,15+12*16: REM set attack/decay
    50 poke s+6,10+10*16: REM set sustain/release
    60 poke s+4,17: REM set sawtooth
    70 REM: the same in 6502 just took a few more lines :)
    run
    *beeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeep*

    Ahh the memories.

    Sprite mutliplexing, realtime video. Fuck, even this fucking useless K6-233 can't even sync its video rendering with the monitor, and drops cycles trying to play-back sound (and its only about 2-3 orders of magnitude faster!)! Shit pc hardware is so screwed! That pissy, 1mhz, 8 bit cpu could render perfecly synced 50 frames/second (PAL) video frames with 3-4 channel music with no glitches, wheras this thing can't even update the mouse pointer smoothly!! What a complete fucking joke!

    Raster interrupts were so funky. And page-zero addressing mode, and index indirect, and indirect indexed :) Woohoo. SID/VIC/6510, *KICKED ARSE*

    I think something surely went wrong along the way. I think it was the IBM PC, and all its ancestors

    __// `Thinking is an exercise to which all too few brains

  • Oh i forgot:

    55 poke s+24,15: REM set volume to max!

    :):)
    __// `Thinking is an exercise to which all too few brains
  • I want to hook up my two SYM1's to make some sort of a "networked deathmatch game" for them. Maybe call it "Quake Zero". It of course wouldn't do very many FPS in 3-D. But with only an LCD Hex display, there wouldn't be much point.
  • Imp Mission works great on FRODO.

    What's FRODO, you ask? Just a fully working C-64 emulator for a variety of platforms. Do a web search on the name and you'll find it.
  • My 8-bit experience was limited (a few times on an Apple II with a bad mailing list program called ApplePost and a few months with a DECmate, which was really just the noble PDP8 at the very end of its long life cycle).

    But I still have my very first 16 bit machine, in fact two of them, the original Columbia PC, one of the first two workable IBM PC clones. (The other was Compaq, the guys next door had one right away in 1983 but we didn't like the toy screen.) The Columbia was a superbly engineered machine that unfortunately was attached to a superbly clueless marketing department. They overpriced the box, didn't provide much support, and after a lot of flailing, disappeared in about 1985, only to have the name re-emerge years later as a hard disk/storage integrator in Florida (Columbia was originally in Columbia, MD).

    I still have all the DOS versions going back to 1.1. Haven't fired up my old Columbias for a long time, but I bet they would run at least DOS 6.22 without a hitch. Only 640K of memory, though, so I wouldn't be able to run Linux, even though it has a whopping huge 10 megabyte hard drive. There are 2 256-K Tecmar memory boards in that box. You don't even want to know how much we paid for those in 1984.

    From the Old Fogy desk ... (P400, 256 megs of RAM, 4x6gig WD drives) ...

    --------
  • I just won bids for an Apple //e and an Atari 800XL. I just can't wait to program in 6502
    assembly again. During the days when these computers were popular, you could really get a feel of the computer's architecture by programming it to the max.

    One thing interesting about these 8-bit computers: they were in production for quite some time. The Apple ][ series (][ to //e) were in production for almost 20 years (1975-1993). Talk about staying power.

    I just found a company that sells a SCSI card and an SVGA card for the Apple ][. They even bundle the SCSI card with a Zip drive. The URL is
    [sequential.com]
    http://www.sequential.com/ramfast.html.


    Kazuo
  • Huh? The 6502 had multiplication & division instructions.. they were just multiplication & division by two. (ASL & ASR)

    Well, I'm specifically thinking of instructions like MUL and DIV on "modern" processors that "fully implement" the operations. I won't argue that bit-shifting operations can, at the basic level, be considered basic vehicles for multiplication and division (obviously, they're what you had to use!) But they're certainly not general-purpose multiplication and division instructions.

    You know as well as I do that assembly language programmers who are only familiar with "modern" assembly languages would be completely lost. :-)

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