🚀 go-pugleaf

On 26/06/2018 20:55, Scott wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Jun 2018 11:31:32 +0100, Gareth's Downstairs Computer
> <headstone255.but.n...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> Yankland and its politics is increasingly irrelevant on
>> a day-to-day basis to the rest of the world (Trump and
>> Clinton the only candidates????? ), so is anyone here
>> interested in computers?
> 
> Cleaning out my shed, I just unearthed some boxes of my old Tandy
> Color Computer stuff. A few intact examples (1 through 3, and I think
> an MC10) plus a bunch of peripherals, cables, tapes, disks, reference
> manuals. Been at least 20 years since I put power to any of it.
> 
> Part of me wants to say how awesome it all was. And it did get me
> started. I first learned to program the MC-10's slightly funky BASIC,
> so deeply baked-in that the keywords had keyboard shortcuts in
> hardware. Seems weird now.
> 
> Then there was Color and Extended BASIC, then 6809 assembler. Hacking
> hardware to add RAM where Tandy never meant for RAM to go,
> overclocking to nearly 2MHz (!), burning custom DOS EPROMs, letting
> the smoke out more times than I care to admit. But the fact is that
> all of this wasn't very shiny after all...sure, it got me started, and
> at the time it was all I could afford, but I didn't know what else I
> was missing. Nostalgia is funny.
> 
> By the time I had hardware that could run OS-9, I'd begun to have
> access to x86 type PCs, and that was pretty much the end of that
> phase. It would take many more years before I started to learn about
> OSes that could do amazing things like run two programs at once.
> 

I was never really interested in such machines, having a low-level 
interest in electronics, and was very much not-invented-here when
it came to others' software, although I did have an Oric and an Atmos
which were a pain in the bum because the colour on the VDU was
controlled by in-line groups of pixels. Did a bit of machine code
programming (NOT assembler  :-(  ) which meant every so often inserting
a sequence of 3 NOPs in case of having to patch in a jump to sort
a problem.


That low-level interest at the moment is trying to fathom out how to
select each of the 4 processors in the RPi3 A53 implementation.

Early in my career, all systems came with a complete hardware manual
including all the registers in I/O, so these days feel a little bit lost
/ swimming out of my depth / fighting blind when so  little info is
around today.

The Small Computer Handbook for the PDP8/E wsa a good example of an
informatie manual!