Forrest M. Mims III

I first learned of Dr Roberts’ work from the television series “Triumph of the Nerds” which is available on Video google. Why not look it up and find out what everybody is talking about.

Without Dr Roberts there would probably be no modern personal computer industry!

One of the wiring designs supplied was a Tic Tac Toe playing machine. Which never worked right. Many years later, when I went over the diagrams, and discovered it had been drawn up wrong. Simulating the “Stepped Logic” on my TI calculator, it played just fine. The kit maker never issued any addendum. I think the kit cost my father about $100, at the time.

I didn’t get to touch a real computer, until John Hopkins Univ. donated some old tube model, desk cabinet thing, to our local Science Academy. Which offered a programming course, over the summer, for the kids. When it wasn’t broken down, I got a chance to stick pins in placards that created its machine language instructions. Another week, and I’d had that Tic Tac Toe game running. But another breakdown cut the schedule time short. Boohoo.

Search for “Triumph of the Nerds” on video sites
to understand Mr Roberts and the other brilliant
people of that time.

If I understand the machine, it had switches on the front to set for the binary format input, and LEDs to represent the binary format result, and presumably some way to input your desired function. This would require you to understand binary notation. Didn’t people eventually mate it to keyboards and CRT monitors?

My first was the COSMAC ELF, which was featured in the pages of Radio Electronics magazine. The CPU was made by RCA, of all people! It was all CMOS and completely static; that is, the clock could run at any speed from maximum all the way down to zero. The ELF had a hex keypad instead of a bank of switches, thank goodness! In the Texas summer I used to have to put a baggie with a couple of ice cubes in it on the CPU or the video chip (either one would work) to keep the 32 character by 20 line video from fuzzing out.

Eventually I got the I/O card, the RS-232 ASCII keyboard and the 4K RAM kit. After loading in Tiny BASIC from cassette it had about 400 bytes free! I gotta say, the keyboard was a giant step up from keying in ASCII codes on the hex keypad. The power supply worked great as a battery charger for my Volkswagen Bug, too!

The Tiny BASIC was amazing! It was so limited but it would do things that would be impossible in any self-respecting programming language today. For example, computed GOTOs. You could LET X=(formula) then GOTO X. If there were no X, it would GOTO the next highest number! Or you could skip the last step and just GOTO (formula). To save program memory, I’d key in the values of a bunch of variables in immediate mode before running a program, just so I wouldn’t have to take up scarce space by declaring them in the code. Learning how to call and return from subroutines in the 1802′s machine code was a real adventure!

Ah, memories!

Second, the “Programming Language Interpreter” was probably nothing more than a stripped down version of BASIC. Possibly reverse engineered from Dartmouth’s BASIC. I wonder if Gates and Allen ever paid the college any royalty? I doubt it was very programmable, by any later standards. Like with Gotos, Returns and IF-THEN statements. Just simple math solving functions, if I recall right.

By 1977, I had a programmable handheld Texas Instruments calculator. That cost me about $199. And it probably did more, out of the box, than the Altair did, fully assembled. In fact, I still have the thing. I reverse engineered several HP calculator games to run on it. A year later, I had the Shack’s TRS-80. But only because the Apple 2 was about a $100 more than I could afford. If I’d known how cheesy the Radio Shack computer would be. I would have held out for the Apple. Years later, I got one via a coworker, who repaired them part time. And never touched the TRS-80 again.

The Apple proved a lot more fun to program, since it’s graphics and sound capacity was superior to the TRS-80. It seemed only limited by one’s imagination. Friends loaned me games and other software for it. Some of the games were obviously what costly Arcade machines were running, back then. I saved a ton of quarters, playing Pac Man, Space Invaders, Galaxian, and Donkey Kong, on the Apple 2. So I guess in the long run, it saved me money. Whereas the Shack’s first computer was a dead-end investment. Meant to exploit our naivety.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASR-33_Teletype

Display, keyboard and mass storage all rolled up into one unit.

My 8080 system, a Heathkit, consisted of the computer, a terminal (a glass teletype), an audio cassette data storage system, a dual floppy hard-sectored drive unit, a dual floppy soft-sectored drive unit, a NTSC monitor for a graphics/sound card, and an external modem. Each piece of hardware was separately powered.Software consisted of MBasic interpreter, Fortran 80 compiler, M80 Assembler, WordStar, Turbo C compiler, CP/M operating system and similar stuff for the Heath Disk Operating System.

Building the computer was just step one.

9 Steve S: I bought mine in 1979 for $350 (with case and P/S). I would have preferred an Apple II but they were over $1000 at the time. The last time I fired up the Ohio Scientific, it still worked!

For a short while I had one of those little Sinclair (Z-80s?) but found the video too finicky. I loved the Superboard & used to program all kinds of elementary video games using the “peek” & “poke” commands. And when I moved from 4K to 8K… The Power! I did purchase a sound kit via Aardvark(?) but it’s lost. I’ll boot up that thing one of these days.

I recall my father-in-law asking, “yeah, but what can you do with it?” “Anything!… just anything!… I had no idea. Computers were just a little all-consuming hobby. Like bobbo, wished I had been more visionary.

RBG

I liked the Teletype with it’s paper tape drive in the other room more, much nicer than the punch cards that we used for our RPG course.

Damn I’m old.

I worry that I am turning into an an old geezer complaining about “today’s youth”.

But it is important that each generation have some exciting new development like we had with PCs and then the internet.

It’s where American innovation comes from.

My grandfather’s generation innovated with affordable motors, which they used to make clever or silly inventions around the farm.

For my dad it was cheap electronics — he always had some Heathkit or other gizmo he was soldering together. He built this awesome stereo which put off the heat of a toaster oven but sounded fantastic, even by today’s standards.

What is the innovative equivalent of this generation? Social Networking, I guess, but that doesn’t seem the same.