Comment by whyenot

Comment by whyenot 3 days ago

In the late 1970s, my dad purchased an S-100 bus computer from Thinker Toys for about $3,000 (would be close to $15,000 today after adjusting for inflation). It had a Z80 microprocessor and ran CP/M. As was true of many hobbyist computers from this era, it came with full source code (in beautifully documented assembly) both for CP/M and for the BIOS. This was important because if you wanted to add peripherals or make other modifications to your computer, you had to edit the source code and recompile the BIOS.

A few years later my dad decided to buy an Epson MX-80 for his computer. The daisy-wheel and the plotter at work (he worked at SRI) just didn't cut it, I guess? This required buying a serial card for the S-100. In order to get that printer to work, he had to first, wire up a cable because the data lines from the card were on different pins in the printer. I believe there was a version of the MX-80 that came with a serial port instead of a parallel port which made some things easier. I was recruited as his assistant. Then he had to modify and recompile the BIOS. Then he had to also make some changes to CP/M. This was a process of trial and error that lasted for weeks. I remember I was away at summer camp and he sent me a letter he printed out on that printer. He was so happy that he finally got it to work.

Anyways, this resurfaced that memory and I thought I might as well share it. I still have the printout he sent me somewhere.

dcminter 3 days ago

Can I humbly suggest that you dig that letter out and get it framed? Random pieces of paper tend to go astray during moves and clear-outs; framed items less so.

Thanks for the nice anecdote.

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jacquesm 3 days ago

I wished someone had given me that particular piece of advice a couple of decades ago.

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- ghaff 3 days ago
  
  On the other hand if you don't show some restraint you end up being buried in paper and lugging way too much of it around--which I did when I was younger.
  
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- Wildgoose 2 days ago
  
  Likewise. I used to possess a hand-written letter from Sophie Wilson (of Acorn/ARM fame) replying to my own hand-written query letter at around 1981 when I was 16 and learning to program my Acorn Atom.
  
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  jacquesm a day ago
  
  Oh that really hurts. That would be an amazing memento.
  
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raudette 3 days ago

I was reading some of the Amiga 1000 material that was surfacing earlier this summer for the 40th anniversary - the Infoworld review ( https://books.google.ca/books?id=cC8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA42&redir_... ) had the following highlight: "Connecting printers is equally easy, since the Amiga uses standard plugs and cabling schemes used by the IBM PC; you can actually unplug an Epson dot-matrix printer from an IBM PC, plug it into an Amiga, and expect it to work without rewiring the cable" I love that this was worth mentioning in 1985.

Similar story, a bit later - my parents had a TeleVideo 1603 system that ran CP/M - I remember my father making a custom cable to connect a Daisywriter letter quality printer to it.

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GuinansEyebrows 3 days ago

> In the late 1970s, my dad purchased an S-100 bus computer from Thinker Toys for about $3,000 (would be close to $15,000 today after adjusting for inflation).

sorry to hijack your thread but this brought up something i hadn't thought about in a while.

when i was a kid getting into computers, say around 96/97, and for a while after that, i always felt a sense of missing out for not having been born earlier in the personal computing revolution, to really get access to what i felt was the ground floor of computer technology.

but then i got older and realized there's no way my single, non-technical, minimum-wage-earning mom could have paid 70s/80s hardware prices for machines.

given the situation i was born into, i now think i was extremely lucky - just early enough to be heavily influenced by early modern computing, but with relatively modern used hardware becoming more accessible to more people.

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glimshe 3 days ago

Great story!

I faced some problems in the old world of computers, but none as fun as this. I've always felt that computing was a lot more visceral back then because we were operating much closer to the machine.

Nowadays, software development is mostly about struggling against other humans: trying to undestand other people's mental models when patching libraries and APIs together. Back in the day, it was man vs machine.

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mark-r 3 days ago

If I remember correctly the serial port was an add-in card. Mine used the parallel connection.