tfreeman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Wed, 8 Mar 2006, bill perkins wrote:
Anne Wilson wrote:
On Tuesday 07 March 2006 23:00, jludwig wrote:
Anne
If they have your email address you go to the bad place!
Hey, that was my first email address, a compuserve one, so I don't think it
would be much use to them now ;-)
Anne
I had one of those, too- 72245,710 was my user ID. Can't believe that
nobody has mentioned Heathkit here- my first two computers were a 6800
SBC and an H-89 (2MHz Z-80, 64K ram, single 5 1/4" floppy). Also worked
on a DEC-10 system in college, ASR-33 teletypes, paper tape... the good
old days!
<<sigh>> The old H89 running cp/m. Never did get around to trying H-DOS or
whatever it was called, although I think it was pretty advanced for
running on Z80. If configged properly, as I recall, you could run 1 5.25
disk internal, two more 5.25 disks external, a 5 meg external hard drive
(I think it was 5 meg although it was about 8 inches across), and I
_think_ you could even get an external pair of 8 inch floppy drives with
something like 256K capacity.
Now the DEC-10 was another story - what with the computer science types
mucking with the OS, while the University was too cheap to get a good UPS
system as thunderstorms wandered through the area. And the cluster line
printers which you just connected to being at another location...
Trying to get a thesis to print off on _that_ system was an exercise in
creative frustration. (Although, in retrospect, much of the difficulty was
not the sytem's "fault" as such, just the university asking too much of
it.)
--
=============================================
If you think Education is expensive
Try Ignorance
Author Unknown
============================================
Yup, I ran HDOS- it wasn't bad, and the source was available; I bought
the books when they were discontinuing them. HDOS was written for the
8080, though, not a Z80 instruction in sight! I added a patch to map
some reserved space to RAM, wound up with 56K RAM and 8K ROM thereby,
and another patch to allow the modem to tie in directly to the terminal,
so I could access the system from work. I got to show my boss what an
actual assembler could do, as opposed to typing hex codes into an EPROM
burner. My boss went to up to the Pres's office and snagged the only PC
in the building, bought a cross assembler for Z80, and the rest (for me)
was history.
--
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"The two most common things in the | Bill Perkins
universe are Hydrogen and Stupidity." | perk@xxxxxxx
| programmer-at-large
F. Zappa | ALL assembly languages done here.
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