1980s Computer Throwback

[Foxbat]

Circa 1980, I had a Northstar Horizon S-100 bus computer in my room, I had to hand-assemble the I/O routines for my keyboard and video card (80 columns and 24 rows was a luxury, it was a Matrox card b/w composite video output). After that, I wrote (in Z80 assembler) my VT-52 emulator. My friend had showed me how to use process states to handle the characters coming in to the serial port (“A” means one thing, “Esc” sets a different state, and so on).

 

[harshness]

Circa 1980, I had a Northstar Horizon S-100 bus computer in my room, I had to hand-assemble the I/O routines for my keyboard and video card (80 columns and 24 rows was a luxury, it was a Matrox card b/w composite video output).

I tinkered with one of those as well as an Imsai 8080 machine when my high school was evaluating new computers. We ended up with a Processor Technologies Sol-20 (only the sides were wood). We used a Teletype model 43 as a printer and a modified TV as a display. The Sol used a less fussy version of CP/M and came with both CBASIC and MBASIC.

After that, I wrote (in Z80 assembler) my VT-52 emulator. My friend had showed me how to use process states to handle the characters coming in to the serial port (“A” means one thing, “Esc” sets a different state, and so on).

This is why later operating systems had built-in buffered I/O routines that handled all of those kinds of things without you having to write your own "driver".

 

[Foxbat]

I may have posted this before, but all the DEC PDP talk made me think of it again. WFYI produced an hour-long documentary on Ken Olsen and the history of Digital Equipment Corporation, available here:

Digital_Man/Digital_World | Digital_Man/Digital_World | PBS

By making computers more accessible, Ken Olsen revolutionized the business world.

www.pbs.org

 

[mdonnelly]

I may have posted this before, but all the DEC PDP talk made me think of it again. WFYI produced an hour-long documentary on Ken Olsen and the history of Digital Equipment Corporation, available here:

Digital_Man/Digital_World | Digital_Man/Digital_World | PBS

By making computers more accessible, Ken Olsen revolutionized the business world.

www.pbs.org

I miss DEC. I manage a DEC virtual machine running on a Windows Server 2012 platform, hosting VAX VMS 6.1. It does it’s limited function perfectly.

 

[navychop]

I don’t even remember the brand of the minicomputer I controlled at NAF Wash DC. But I still remember how I knew how to swap out that HDD for one with MANY times the capacity, and maybe a tenth the size. It would have sped up our work significantly. But figured I couldn’t get away with it.

Just to punish me, I later worked in Configuration Management, and had Hell with ships at sea constantly doing unauthorized upgrades, rather than wait for the shipalt. This would normally be punishable, but none of the skippers understood computers- and may have been persuaded to authorize the work.

 

[satjay]

First computer for me was a Commodore 64. It’s crazy seeing the retro computers coming back and the price they are being sold for