The Shop > Electronics & IC Programing
Adventures in old 80s computers.
philf:
My first programming was at Manchester Poly using Fortran. We had to hand punch cards and leave them with a technician to be run and then collect the results next day. The only alternative then was my trusty Thornton P221 Comprehensive Log Log Slide Rule.
In my early days at work I had adventures with an HP 9825 and a pen plotter. I was intent on building bike frames and wrote a program to plot out patterns which when wrapped around a tube would provide a template to cut to so that two tubes would meet perfectly. I also mass produced my Christmas cards on the HP plotter one year.
My next venture into Basic was with a Commodore PET in my lunchtimes.
My first home computer was a second hand ZX81 which didn't work properly - random characters kept popping up on screen - the guy I bought it off was reluctant to give me a refund saying it had always done that - never thinking that there had been a fault.
I went upmarket then with an Acorn ATOM which had 2K RAM. I bought some surplus boards (where have all the shops gone that used to sell such stuff?) and desoldered the memory chips to expand the ATOM to all of 12K.
I only had the ATOM for a couple of weeks when I was offered a BBC model B. BBC Basic probably still is the best. I designed and built a flat bed pen plotter to use with the BEEB which could even be used to list out programs. The program was all in BASIC and worked remarkably fast considering the speed of the processor. (1MHz). Someone at work bought a Watford DDFS interface which was soon cloned and this gave me access to the luxury of 3.5" Floppies rather than the tedious cassette. Another lunchtime project was making sideways RAM boards into which you could load ROM images from the floppy drive. The program to run the sideways RAM was a mixture of Basic and machine code.
Jumping forward to the 21st century and BBC Basic is very much alive and well and is available to run on Windows (up to and including 8.1) and Linux. There is a free version of BBC Basic for Windows (limited to 16K programs) or for £29.99 you can use up to 256Mb and compile your programs into executables. This is on my list of to-dos as I wrote dozens of programmes to do all sorts of engineering calculations. See http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcwin/bbcwin.html
I still have 2 BBC Model Bs and a BBC B+ with 64K memory. I suspect none of them would switch on without replacing a few capacitors having been unused for so many years. I do miss the virtually instant start-up and occasionally hanker after playing Repton.
I'm sure that having limited memory forced people into writing efficient code. Many years ago a colleague and I developed a document management system which used VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) to interface Autocad with Excel. A bizarre feature was that you could write a few hundred lines of program and then find a function which could reduce the job to say 10 lines. You would imagine that the file containing the VBA would then be smaller as a result of losing 90 lines. Not so - our friends at Microsoft for some unknown reason never actually deleted anything you wrote even though you thought you'd got rid of it! Thus your more efficient programme was in fact bigger than the less efficient one. You couldn't access the deleted stuff in History so why keep it? The only way round this was to export the modules one by one in to a new project. It made me wonder if all Microsoft software was the same.
Phil.
Bluechip:
--- Quote from: DavidA on August 06, 2014, 03:12:18 PM ---How did you manage to run over your computer ?
Dave.
--- End quote ---
Alas, 'tis a sorry tale ... The village where I lived had a 'Beeb' computer club on Thursday evenings at the local primary school. So, resplendent in our flares and kipper ties we assembled with our kit to boast of our prowess and swap code etc.
I was just about to open the tailgate to load the Beeb etc. into the car and set off when a joiner/shop-fitter mate arrived in his van with a load of really nice strip-wood for use on my model boats. In order to get this stuff into the garage I needed to move the car, so reversed it up the drive ( instead of using the front door, in which case I would have noticed I'd left the Beeb behind the car, I used the side door ) .... :palm:
I have to tell you that polystyrene sarcophagus it comes in is no protection against the awful stomp of a Volvo 245 GLT :bang: :bang:
So, I was left with a 5" Floppy drive and a Cub monitor with nobody to talk to .... :Doh:
Really snazzy straight dense grained timber though ... :drool:
Dave
vtsteam:
Like PhilF my first experience with computers was with FORTRAN and punch cards handed to the university tech, and then waiting days for the result. I didn't do much of that, but it was required for one of my courses. I hated it!
When I got hooked was the late seventies when my calculator stopped working and I went to Radio Shack to buy a new one. They had (besides the Model 1 TRS-80, which I didn't even notice at the time) something called the Pocket Computer -- about the size of a wide calculator. It was programmable in a limited form of BASIC. I bought it and spent days working out routines for my design work at the time. It was great! No more waiting and punch cards!
Well it wasn't two months before I outgrew that and wanted more horsepower. The TRS-80 was too much money for me. But about that time Tandy came out with the Color computer with 4K of ram, used the TV as a monitor, and any cassette deck for storage, and I could afford that. In another couple months I had piggybacked 16K ram chips onto the 4K chips pulling in another address line, etc. Later I got an old IBM Selectric terminal, ripped the boards out of it, used an ASCII to EBCDIC conversion table in reserved memory and had myself a letter quality printer. That soon became old hat, so I built an LNW-80 with my own eprom programmer, etc, etc.
AdeV:
Being born in the early 1970s, I missed the so-called "golden era" of computers that some of the old fogies here will rattle on about from their comfy chairs.... punch cards, paper tape, etc. Golden era my ar*e :lol:
As any fule noes, the real Golden Era started in the late 1970s with the introduction of the TRS-80, Sharp MZ-80K and Commodore PET computers; and went "mainstream", here in the UK at least, with the BBC B, Sinclair ZX-80/81 and Spectrum, the various Amstrads, the Vic-20 & C64.
My first ever contact with a computer was when a BBC B - complete with colour monitor and disk drives - "visited" our school (at the time, Cheshire primary schools had to time-share the only BBC it owned, I think it stayed for 1 or 2 weeks at a time). I was completely hooked, although I barely touched another computer until our Sinclair QL turned up sometime in 1984 (actually, it must have just tuned 30 years old sometime in the last couple of weeks).
Bluechip:
--- Quote from: AdeV on August 08, 2014, 09:33:22 PM ---
Being born in the early 1970s, I missed the so-called "golden era" of computers that some of the old fogies here will rattle on about from their comfy chairs.... punch cards, paper tape, etc. Golden era my ar*e :lol:
--- End quote ---
Don't forget the Noodle Picker :lol: :lol:
Dave
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