HP 9845s? (And an original IBM PC.)

From: RebelTerry <RebelTerry_at_home.net>
Date: Tue Mar 27 02:20:17 2001

> How did you come to write games for the 9845 anyway? Did you sell them?
> It's not exactly the most popular game platform.

Well, this friend and I worked at NASA JSC. We were shuttle flight
controllers in the early STS days, including STS-1. (You should see
my collection of stuff from the first shuttle flight!) In our off hours, we
played with the 9845, writing games: lunar landing simulator (which I
did rewrite into C++ and still play), submarine search and destroy
(which I rewrote and was published by Broderbund Software as
"Search and Destroy", car race, solitaire, blackjack, Star Trek, GREAT
baseball and 1-on-1 basketball games, and several others. FAR better
than anything on the market in the early 80s. (Of course, that's the
advantage of having a $70,000 machine at your disposal!)

Never sold them. I left NASA in '82 (to come to Boeing) and
interviewed an HP rep from Corvallis, showed her all the great stuff.
Her response: "Outstanding! How about coming to work for us and
writing aero engineer software for wind tunnel testing and such?"

No thanks.

> And do you have any other fun toys in your collection? I'm being nosy since
> we're both in Seattle.

Actually, I do have an *original* IBM PC. March 82, 48k motherboard
(not the later 64k), SINGLE side 160K floppy, Amdek color monitor.
And some games I wrote for that. I'm heartbroken that I threw out my
original DOS 1.0 disks/book back in about '84, when DOS 2.1 came
out. (I do still have all the 2.1 disks & books.)

So, if anyone knows where I could beg, borrow, or steal a DOS 1.0...

;-}

BTW, my wife's uncle still has his original IBM PC Jr, complete with
chicklet keyboard. Gonna half to try to scam him out of that.

> BtW, whenever I try to mail to RebelTerry_at_home.net, I get a message saying
> "Relaying denied". I have to use tlb55_at_home.net instead.

No idea what's going on there. Relaying bumps usually happen when
the sender tries going through the wrong SMTP server. Don't know
why the other would work.

> P.S. If the BASIC listing uses keywords in optional ROMs, and the working
> machine doesn't have those ROMs, what happens when you try to print out the
> listing?

Good question....

Thanks.

RT
Received on Tue Mar 27 2001 - 02:20:17 BST