hundt@OCCLUSAL.RUTGERS.EDU (Thomas M. Hundt) (03/08/91)
|=Added an extra 2102 for lower case Everyone's favorite. Many people had a switch, to select graphics or greek chars. |=Added a board from Exatron to put 64K in the keyboard. |=(I never did get an expansion interface.) EI gave you lots more fun: rs232 boards, double-density boards... and a big, loud cassette select relay to toggle on and off rapidly to scare naive users... |Added some goodies to port 255 to use it as a simple but workable |2-bit (!!) sampler. Yow. How about full A/D? 8 bit chips were expensive back then! |Wrote a printer driver (tsr) to change outgoing text into the font of |your choice... Even got it published in Micro-80. Cool. |Modified all the Big-5 games (and others worthy of such :-) to use an |Atari joystick (which had a socket hack installed). This alone saved my We installed the Ataris in parallel with the arrow keys. No software mods needed :-) Lots of cutesy hardware hacks: tri-color LEDS to indicate turbo or normal mode, and on the disk drives to indicate reading or writing; light pens; hooking stuff up to ports... Dennis Kitzst (sp?!) and his "Custom TRS-80" books :-) (I customized my first PC a little, too, but somehow the fun went out of it...) |My favorite things were hacking on disks and such. Pretty neat. |Something I noticed which was *really* funny for me... Quite a few Eventually had the entire instruction set memorized in hex, from staring at boot sectors... Was fun figuring out how the latest SuperUtility was protected and pulling its teeth. Those disk drives cost $500 at the time... and held, what, 40k or 80k for double-density? One time I deleted and deallocated half the directory to make room to fit the entire MS-Fortran compiler on a single disk. 'Course, nowadays, programs are *pigs* in terms of size... we had programs that worked *well*, like Scripsit and ST80-III (with custom modified control codes for better VT100 emulation) and SuperUtility and the assembler... that ran in 16-32K. And, we had LDOS which had more features than MS-DOS! Those were fun times. -Tom Hundt
ralf+@cs.cmu.edu (Ralf Brown) (03/08/91)
In article <Mar.7.17.19.26.1991.15698@occlusal.rutgers.edu> hundt@OCCLUSAL.RUTGERS.EDU (Thomas M. Hundt) writes: }'Course, nowadays, programs are *pigs* in terms of size... we had }programs that worked *well*, like Scripsit and ST80-III (with }custom modified control codes for better VT100 emulation) and }SuperUtility and the assembler... that ran in 16-32K. And, we Not all programs are memory pigs. In fact, there are still quite a few good (and current) MSDOS programs that will run in under 64K. For example, Qedit about 9K edit space when running in 64K LIST file browser with options out the wazoo, runs in 32K RBcomm term prog with VT102/VT52/AVATAR, macro language, etc., runs in 46K (all of which can make use of more than 64K for better performance, bigger buffers, etc). Sorry, no ObHack unless the size optimizations I've applied to my RBcomm count.... -- {backbone}!cs.cmu.edu!ralf ARPA: RALF@CS.CMU.EDU FIDO: Ralf Brown 1:129/3.1 BITnet: RALF%CS.CMU.EDU@CMUCCVMA AT&Tnet: (412)268-3053 (school) FAX: ask DISCLAIMER? Did | It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's I claim something?| what we know that ain't so. --Will Rogers
gaudreau@juggler.East.Sun.COM (Joe Gaudreau (Spaced for Rent)) (03/08/91)
hundt@OCCLUSAL.RUTGERS.EDU (Thomas M. Hundt) writes:
=Those disk drives cost $500 at the time... and held, what, 40k
=or 80k for double-density? One time I deleted and deallocated
=half the directory to make room to fit the entire MS-Fortran
=compiler on a single disk.
It was 40trks, 10 sectors, 256 byte per wasn't it? That's about 100k.
That's a *lot* of storage! :-) Fortran? Yick. :-) How about SAM-76?
='Course, nowadays, programs are *pigs* in terms of size... we had
=programs that worked *well*, like Scripsit and ST80-III (with
=custom modified control codes for better VT100 emulation) and
=SuperUtility and the assembler... that ran in 16-32K. And, we
=had LDOS which had more features than MS-DOS!
Don't forget NewDos [80]. Very nice! MacroMon-The Shadow was the coolest
monitor, single stepper, disassembler, etc I have ever run across. Small,
powerful as all getout, and cheap!
=Those were fun times.
Yes they were. The good old days! Making a light pen for 99 cents and
writing the driver yourself was most excellent. The nostalgia I get from
even thinking about adjusting the heads on my tape recorder makes me
want to cry :-)
alas, the Z80 (and friends), I knew it well...
Later dudes,
Joe
-=-