TIME MACHINE PC from 40 Years Ago

[wardmundy]

Hard to believe that 40 years ago, 256 bytes of RAM was personal computing...

https://plus.google.com/117204847546735076356/posts/KFqFN3ySPFs

COSMAC Elf tutorial from Popular Electronics

History of the first sub-$1,000 PC

 

[wa4zlw]

back in the early 80s I had a BigBoard z80 with 64kb ram and I had four (4) 8" SSSD floppy disks on it running CP/M. Used that till I got a Compaq Luggable (portable) 64kbram, I think dual 3.5" floppy and I added a 10mb hard card!

 

[tycho]

I built a Cosmac! My very first computer of any kind at all. Hex keypad for entry and RF output. Played Pong on the family second TV (12-inch B&W).

Then I got a "real" computer! TRS-80 Model 1. I paid hundreds for the upgraded 16K RAM. "Kansas City Standard" file saving to a cassette tape. Never understood why that damn tape would never work. Finally noticed that there was a mechanism that used a piece of plastic that would push the tape away from the head when you either hit stop or pause (can't now remember). That "pusher" would dent the tape! Mostly inaudible to a listener, but the drop-out ruined replay of any bits on that particular section of tape...

 

[Dave Gray]

Oh my, the Big Board. We (myself and co-workers) bought a bunch of bare boards and built them up from scratch. I had mine built into an old ADDS terminal housing. Dual 8" floppies were in a separate housing (made of MDF, weighed a ton.) Later I added a hard disk (originally for the TRS-80), so I had to write the CPM BIOS and BOOT for it. Those were the days...

 

[Jay Deal]

Speaking of a Trash 80 (raises hand, had a couple), anyone remember perusing the back of Computer Shopper for the latest BBS listings? Or using Compuserve for CB chat? I thought that was hot sh*t back then.

 

[tycho]

Computer Shopper! What a phonebook of computer love!!

Yes; had Compuserve, but never did CB. Pretty much only used it as a portal to the Official Airline Guide at a time when I traveled a lot. I was a charter member of Quantum, that became AOL, and I still have that email/log-in: the initials of my [email protected]

BBS: spent most of my life on them. Ran a few. After the earliest BBS incarnations I became very active in "FidoNet."

 

[wardmundy]

Computer Shopper nearly made us rich. They wrote a glowing article on my old WAMPUM program in the mid-80's. We happened to be out of town for Easter. When we returned, the mailbox was literally overflowing with $20 checks. There IS an Easter Bunny!

 

[Jay Deal]

Computer Shopper nearly made us rich. They wrote a glowing article on my old WAMPUM program in the mid-80's. We happened to be out of town for Easter. When we returned, the mailbox was literally overflowing with $20 checks. There IS an Easter Bunny!

Back then, an individual could place an ad in the classifieds of CS and could really get somewhere if they happened to have the right hardware or software people wanted - I can still recall seeing Michael Dell's listings when his company was called something else (PC's Limited?). I still have the original motherboard for a "Zeos" system which included one of the best keyboards with it I ever owned. Zeos was a big CS advertiser and got most of their sales through that medium. But things changed in the mid 90's about the time that everybody stopped buying 3.5" floppies because you had so many extra free AOL disks that you had received through the mail - I still have some around here somewhere.

 

[tycho]

3.5-inch? Bah; REAL men used 8-inch floppies!

I exaggerate -- I never personally owned anything older than a 5-inch floppy device myself. But it pre-dated the IBM PC and could store only 90KB of data in its first incarnation. The 360KB-storing IBM 5-incher was an AMAZING feat of data compression!

 

[wa4zlw]

Oh my, the Big Board. We (myself and co-workers) bought a bunch of bare boards and built them up from scratch. I had mine built into an old ADDS terminal housing. Dual 8" floppies were in a separate housing (made of MDF, weighed a ton.) Later I added a hard disk (originally for the TRS-80), so I had to write the CPM BIOS and BOOT for it. Those were the days...

My Big Board was built in a System 4000 Chassis from Racal-Milgo (where I worked). The disk controller came from Milgo talking to the four flops. was a neat machine. CP/M wordstar worked well

leon

 

[wa4zlw]

oh geez computer shopper and CompuServe. Was on CIS early on and frequented the Broadcast Professionals Forum and another media (sort of related one) plus some ham ones.

computer shopper weighed a ton

ldz

 

[krzykat]

Yeah, I remember all of that. My dad worked for DEC, so we had a raised floor enclosed porch with the computer before the PC that I remember swapping 8 inch disks to play "star trek" on that was a screen with * * * X * * - for long range scanners - was basically battleship - LOL. Then the Apple in High School before the Trash 80. Then I remember in high school that Tandy came out with a POCKET computer !!!! - this thing was a beast - and I used it to cheat in all my classes because teachers thought it was just a calculator, but I programmed it to do everything from math to spanish translations - LOL.

 

[Dave Gray]

Still have one of those in storage somewhere, (the Pocket model 2), with the cassette tape interface/printer module. Which was a trip, the printer was actually a 4 color plotter, with little itty-bitty ball-point pens. Which never lasted long. And were particular about what paper you used. Sounded like a woodpecker off in the distance as the solenoid would hit the pen to make it write on the paper.

 

[GomezAddams]

The first computer I owned was a Vic20. Screaming 5K bytes of ram, and a cassette interface. I quickly dumped that for an Atari 800 with cassette (48k of RAM!!! how could anyone ever run out of memory with 48k?). I eventually added a floppy drive and a homemade 300 baud modem.

Someone gave me an Atari 400 which I ended up using to control the lights for our band.

I did a lot of 6502 assembler on those machines. I don't miss it - the 6502 was barbaric - even by the day's standards. The Z80 was *so* much nicer.

 

[krzykat]

It's so funny to look at what we used to program then versus now. Our code was streamlined because it had to be. When your program was running off of one or two floppy drives or were lucky enough to have a 10 Meg HD, or in the later days with the seagate ST-4096 - you had to write code that was fast for your 4.77 mhz intel chip. Now days, people just use a plugin with so much bloatware just to accomplish a small task that they could write.

 

[jerrm]

My first was a game machine - Bally/Astrocade. Z80 CPU, 4 color true bitmap graphics, 4K RAM. Great controllers, some of the best home console games out there, by far the best audio of anything for the home when it was released, but it was relatively expensive and never got market share. MESS has an emulator for it. I'll occasionally fire it up and play.

It had a BASIC language cartridge (with a 3.5mm cassette interface as part of the cart). There was no keyboard, but it had a 24 key keypad, so entering programs was something like texting before smartphones. Did some pretty interesting things with it. Sort of amazing what we could do with so little.

Next was the 48K Atari 800 with third party OS and floppies daisy chained on a 19.2kb serial bus. Thought I was set for life.

 

[tycho]

Yes to the Z80: it was the chip in the TRS-80, IIRC. Screamer for the time...

 

[wa4zlw]

Z80 was a good chip but there are two that I prefer.

1. NSC800 was a CMOS chip that used the z80 instruction set and had the intel Bus as well as the Intel software interrupts.

2. 8051 family especially phillips derivatives. Used them in the vending machines we did, pay phone monitor equipment and others. Great chipset and efficient.

Leon