On 2021-05-06 21:35, Gene Heskett wrote:
On Thursday 06 May 2021 13:54:23 Skip Montanaro wrote:
> Machine language is so much simpler, and you can code with just a
> hexpad.
Pshaa... All you need are front panel switches. ;-) (Yes, I had a
professor who required is to 'key' in our programs on the front panel,
of a rack mounted PDP-11 as I recall. Needless to say, we didn't use
an assembler either. We just wrote raw opcodes and their arguments on
paper. This was in the late 70s.)
[snip]
Sounded like a good idea, so I ordered a quest super elf board which only
had a hex keypad and hex monitor, along with a copy of RCA's programming
the 1802. This was in 1978 IIRC. That grew an s-100 backplane and a
$400 4k of static ram kit. And I built the rest of the interfaceing
including the video to lay a new, digital academy leader countdown out
of whole cloth.
4K? Luxury!
My first machine was a Mk14 from Science of Cambridge. I had the extra
RAM and the I/O chip, giving a total of 768 bytes (256 + 256 + 128,
non-contiguous, of course). And one of the bits in the second block was
faulty.
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