On 03/09/2015 21:46, Francisco Ares wrote: > Me, too, a hardware guy, but having to learn high level stuff. Here at > the company that work for, we had a programmer a couple of years ago, > that has gone for a better opportunity. So I got his load. > > Blinking a bunch of LEDs is where I started. The first ones with simple > transistors, resistors and capacitors, TTLs were next, and then, > finally, a Z80 with an UV EPROM,
Z80? A fine CPU. Built by a bunch of guys who left Intel early on, convinced a full 8 bit cpu with 16 address lines was possible! That chip powered so many home pcs in the late 70s and early 80s. That and the 6502 # having to be programmed at the > university lab in a terribly monstrous gig A giant thing with a ZIL socket and huge UV tubes to blank the EPROM> Yup, I remember them well > - there was a teletype > (remember those?) Golf balls. Gods, those things made a racket. But worse still was line printers with 136 disks, one for each character position. If you printed just the right things, you could get them to play out a tune :-) > where a paper tape had to be punched with the byte > codes, hand assembled from mnemonics, the tape transferred to another > part where it was read while the bytes been burnt to the EPROM; if one > missed or twisted a byte, everything had to be done again, program tapes > being literally patched over and over. Nowadays it all look very funny, > but not at all on those days with a final degree project deadline > approaching ;-) Oh no, not punched paper tape. All I remember is thousands of tiny yellow punched shards that floated everywhere like confetti.... > Thanks for the opportunity for an old story to be remembered. We old farts here reminisce about every 6 months or so. It usually starts when someone asks a question like: did you ever work with those original 8 inch floppies? and the thread goes on for days :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
