Woohoo!

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Fri Jan 9 21:47:33 2004

On Fri, 2004-01-09 at 10:01, Mike wrote:
> I realized one of my earliest cc desires and now have a complete SWTPc
> system to play with with the arrival of my newest toy:

Floppies on an SWTP?! Yowza.

My first computer! I bought an Ollivetti TE318 to go with it -- that
damned thing cost me $900 from American Used Computer.

I got my first lesson in vaporware: I found that SWTP "4K BASIC"
required 6K of memory to run -- never mind that when I stumbled upon
BYTE magazine later, I found it was the SLOWEST BASIC by a huge margin.

I sprung for another tube of 2102's. I eventually stuffed 20K into that
machine, but I needed a variac to keep the power supply from drooping!

I had CORES and other junk, but I ended up writing a cross-assembler in
DG Nova macro assembler that spit out binary object onto paper tape, and
wrote a binary loader. It was very fashionable to write record-oriented
binary loaders in 1977.

I wrote a file manager program and drivers for a 7-track Pertec magtape
for the machine, using a parallel card. 4 bits plus a clock track (sic),
what did I know. Booted the tape "OS" from papertape. It did something
like 400bpi. The tape software, complete with coding embarrassments (eg.
loop counter 0 - 255, not 0 - 0 for loop=256!) is on my website some
where (at least a few pages, scanned) but I can't find them.
Received on Fri Jan 09 2004 - 21:47:33 GMT