[BC] 8008s & nostalgia

[WFIFeng@aol.com]

In a message dated 08/10/2006 9:31:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
cld at admin.umass.edu writes:

>  Ahhh- the good old days and sitting at one's desk with a slide rule, a can
>   of RC cola (or Meisterbrau ;) and Word Star on a Radio Shack
>  TRS80...............
>  
>   I wax nostalgic.

I remember WordStar... I got to be fairly proficient at it, in fact! :) It 
was running on an original IBM PC with 640K of RAM and a 20 meg HD. (We were 
livin' high-on-the-hog!) I think it was DOS 3.2, too.  Also doing 6502 Assembly 
on an Apple IIe to run an X-Y plotter for diagnosing digitizer tablets, and 
BASIC on a NorthStar for semi-automated bench testing of "Bit Pad" units... all 
at Summagraphics in Fairfield. As much as I love what I do at WFIF, there's a 
small part of me that misses the everyday tinkering with the hardware at the 
bit & gate level like that! That job at Summa was my 2'nd favorite, after WFIF. 
A whole bunch of us got Pink Slipped when they started sending a lot of the 
manufacturing & testing work overseas. Oh well. I don't think they're even a 
shell of their former selves anymore.

That NorthStar had a really funny "dialect" of BASIC, too. I didn't like it, 
so I write a utility to let me see the data in the EXE and modify it. It 
originally used "EXAM" and "FILL" instead of the more familiar "PEEK" and "POKE". 
Well, after I was done with it, it was much more standard. ;) That was a fun 
project! It was also fun to re-write the original diagnostic routines so they 
would report directly what the bit values were when errors were encountered. 
Originally, you had to use a calculator to figure out the bit pattern errors! 
ABSURD! (I wonder where the original programmer's head was at!) So I wrote new 
routines to give a nice neat display of 1's & 0's, with the error bits clearly 
delineated.

Hey, *you* got me started! ;)

The broadcast-related thread here is where I used a Commodore 128 to do some 
simple, primitive automation at WFIF to record satellite-delivered feeds 
overnight in the early '90s. A friend was unloading a PILE of Commodore stuff for 
$50, so I bought it. :) Details can be found at my WEBsite:

www.mymorninglight.org/ham/C64.htm
(case sensitive)

Willie...