jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Fri Feb 6 17:27:50 CST 2009
I built my first two PCs from advertisements for parts from the back of Popular Electronics. My first home built was purchased and built in 1977, the year before I got out of the Navy. It was an "S100" (the backplane standard) z-80 1 mhz processor (could access 64K ram) board with (2) 4K static RAM boards (dynamic ram didn't exist yet), and (3) 8K static RAM boards, 1 of which never functioned properly. So I had a system with 24 K of RAM. It had a terminal board with 4K of RAM (80 * 24 lines IIRC) and a general IO board with a serial adapter which loaded data from a cassette tape at 1.2 KBaud. Somewhere or another I found a 16KB "Zapple basic" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapple_Monitor So I would spend 3 minutes loading the 16K zapple basic into my 24K or RAM, leaving me 8K for my programs. That was what I originally learned to program with, although it tended to crash a lot. My next computer, built in ~1982 was a HUGE step up, a SBC (single board computer), again a kit I purchased and soldered together. It used an 16 mhz 80186 uC and had onboard space for 256K dynamic RAM, although you could use these funky sockets that allowed "stacking" two ram chips on top of each other to double your RAM to 512k. The sockets were extremely unreliable so I eventually just soldered the bottom row of chips, then soldered another set on top. Bend out the CAS line and soldered a wire down into the board and voila, 512 Kbytes dynamic RAM hardwired. WOAH!!! That was the system with a dual 1mbyte floppy. It ran CPM86 and I purchased Turbo Pascal from some French guy nobody (including me) had ever heard of called Philippe Kahn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn#Borland_.281982-1995.29 At that time (1980-84) I worked for a startup Graphics company called Megatek Corp down in Sorrento Valley, CA. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5247/is_n16_v12/ai_n28601533/pg_1 At that time they made high end graphics workstations and I repaired those workstations. In 1983 I found 4 of their low end workstations in the dumpster and hauled them back in to the plant and requested to be allowed to keep them. They were in the dumpster because they were engineering prototypes and had to be destroyed for "tax reasons". Like hell I said, and eventually I got permission to take them home. My SBC had a pair of "high speed serial" ports and could talk to these terminals at 128K bit / sec. The terminals actually used the same processor (80186) as my SBC, with 512 kbytes of display list memory to build pictures in, and a dedicated video display "instruction set" firmware in 512K of PROM, which allowed drawing lines (in color!) and doing "hardware translation / rotation / scaling", IOW the terminal itself could store the picture, and then make it bigger or smaller (scaling), move it back and forth across the screen (translation) and rotate the image in 3D. It could also do polygon fill color manipulation, z-axis hidden surface elimination etc. All VERY whiz bang in those days. These "low end" terminals sold for about $30,000 in 1982 and I had 4 of them, though I gave 3 away to friends who also had built the identical SBC with me. I had a friend that wrote Fortran display drivers for Megatek who gave me programming lessons in Turbo Pascal, and about a year later I had written a complete driver set (interface to every single graphics instruction that the display understood) for Turbo Pascal to interface to these Megatek Terminals and had a demo program written that drew a sphere in 3D using triangle polygons, which could be scaled / rotated / translated. And thus a programmer was born. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com Drew Wutka wrote: > If they aren't store bought movie videos (which usually have Macro > protection from copying), you can pretty easily convert them to a DVD > with a computer that has a TV input jack (a lot of newer ones (last few > years) have them). > > Just a thought.... > > Ya gotta admit though, the period where some PC's used cassette tape > drives just plain sucked. Ever try to load a big program from one of > those? > > Error... > > Error... > > Error... > > ;) > > Drew > > -----Original Message----- > From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com > [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby > Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 1:31 PM > To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving > Subject: Re: [AccessD] OT: I'm old > > When I built my second PC in 1982, I bought a double 1 mbyte 8" floppy > drive for $600, all in one > physical case. I had heard of them hard disk thingies (and fixed them > in the US Navy) but my single > board computer didn't have an interface for it. > > On a similar note, I have many boxes of VHS tapes in the basement, which > I haven't even opened since > we moved up from Mexico in 2000. I actually do have a TV with a VCR > built into it but when that goes... > > John W. Colby > www.ColbyConsulting.com > > > The information contained in this transmission is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain II-VI Proprietary and/or II-VI Business Sensitive material. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender immediately and destroy the material in its entirety, whether electronic or hard copy. You are notified that any review, retransmission, copying, disclosure, dissemination, or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. > >