Kemeny & Kurtz - The Invention Of BASIC

premelec

Senior Member
There were delay lines - not exactly speaker and microphone but small transducers...Cores worked better not having to be refreshed constantly. - Static RAM. Also there was a rotating drum with capacitors being recharged or discharged like a dynamic RAM way back - before digital computers but after Turing Machine ideas - 1937...?
 

stan74

Senior Member
You can imagine all those scientists trying make a fast storage device, I guess they tried frogs once..who knows.
 

Technoman

Senior Member
At the end of the seventies, short waves were still in use prior to the building of an earth station in a remote place like New Hebrides, now Vanuatu.
Due to ionospheric conditions the signal stream was not steady, eventually leading to a communication outage.

The telex system was using two types of delay lines : for short time outage, a recirculating memory made out of a long length of coax cable and for long time outage, a magnetic tape loop.
 

jims

Senior Member
"THE GOOD OLD DAYS"...The first computer that I worked on was the IBM 1620 (a "scientific machine??" with core memory, and Fortran programming (I had a hard time getting my head around the concept of "do loops"..also...did any of you use the 8048 and 8080 single chip processors back in the 1970's? JimS
 

Technoman

Senior Member
I did not program an 8080, but was a member of a team in charge of redesigning a system based before on an Intel 8080 with a Motorola 6800. 8080 (and 6800) needed some few chips around to work...
 

fernando_g

Senior Member
For me, Fortran 4 running on a Control Data transistor computer. CDC6600? Don't exactly remember.

My first micontroller experince was with a RCA Cosmac 1802. In assembly language.
This proved to be so painful, that I only ventured again in software 25 years later. With the Picaxe.
 
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BESQUEUT

Senior Member
"THE GOOD OLD DAYS"...The first computer that I worked on was the IBM 1620 (a "scientific machine??" with core memory, and Fortran programming (I had a hard time getting my head around the concept of "do loops"..also...did any of you use the 8048 and 8080 single chip processors back in the 1970's? JimS
I remember trying to program a filesystem in FORTRAN on an IBM 8080 micro.
Sometimes, reading data randomly corrupt data elsewere. Worked a week to undertand that the reading buffer was too long and then corrupted next record.
Another time a subroutine change a value passed by reference (say X=X+3...)
But the main code pass the value 2 in place of a variable. Till this time the constant 2 was 5...
Not evident to debug...
Next, I heard of Lisa programming. I send a letter to Apple and received a bundle of typewrited sheets named "Inside_Macintosh". This one is still my bible...
There are hand writed notes at the bottom of pages by Caroline Rose and mens like Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs or Bill Atkinson...

My mac is older than the SE, so I do not have secret-photos-hidden-in-rom but signatures in the housing.
 
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lbenson

Senior Member
...did any of you use the 8048 and 8080 single chip processors back in the 1970's? JimS
[GEEZE]
Yes, I coded 8080 assembly language, but preferred Z80 because of its superior move commands. And then preferred Small C by Ron Cain, which first appeared in the May 1980 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia (per Wikipedia, because memory of dates is a little imperfect now)--I had it working on my built-from-boards CP/M micro shortly after that publication. I never used Basic on the early microcomputers--my knowledge of it started with the IBM PC (which I had been reluctant to adapt, since I preferred the flat one megabyte address space of the Motorola 68000).

I wrote a (partial) CP/M operating system and hardware emulator for the 68000 which gave access to the hardware (memory and floppy disks) of my Z80 CP/M machine. This was possible because the 68000 was "clocked"--you could slow down the 1mHz speed to seconds or even minutes by controlling the clock so that the Z80 could process or provide the information the 68000 needed. Terminal interaction was direct from the 68000.
[/GEEZE]
 
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