Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

On Fri, 27 Apr 2018 at 00:48, Fred Cisin via cctalk 
wrote:

> The Honda 600 was NOT a bike. Well, mostly not.  After demise of the mid
> 1960s Honda S600/S800 ("poor-man's-Ferrari" design exercise that got out
> of hand and went into production), Honda engineers took a 360CC parallel
> twin, detuned it and upped it to 600cc, added a differential, and a
> reverse (tacked on to the outside of the case), and put it in a car body
> that resembled the Mini.  AN600 was the first Hondas officially imported
> into USA (1970).  A later Z600 had a "sportier" body, and one was cut in
> half in the down-under movie "Malcolm"

Never heard of any of them. I guess they were not sold outside North
America and Japan.

Kei cars are extremely rare in Europe as there is no financial advantage or
incentive to own them, and without that, they're cramped and overpowered.

Oddly, the 600cc "supersport" motorcycle category is huge, in contract,
because insurance is much cheaper for machines of 600cc or less.

But I know little of cars. Evil tin boxes, to me as a bicyclist and
motorcyclist, generally driven by homicidal morons.

> He was into music, and wanted MIDI, etc.

Then the Atari ST would have been a better bet, no? Although of course it
came some years later than MSX.

> And, of course, he never mastered conversion of the Ensoniq Mirage disks.
> (each track had 1024 byte sectors numbered 0 through 4, and a 512 byte
> sector #5)

O_o

> > Mindset?
> Obscure 80186 MS-DOS machine with interesting graphics innovations and no
> market.  Designed by es-Atari engineers.

*Googles*

Nifty but even in 1984 I think I could have told you that that was a
heavily-compromised design...

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Re: Visiting Boston - Classic computer recommendations (Huw Davies)

[Lars Brinkhoff via cctalk]

Michael Thompson wrote:
> Please visit us at the Rhode Island Computer Museum. About 60 miles south
> of boaton.
> http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/

If I do, I'd expect ITS to be up and running before I left.

Do you have anything for KS10 networking?  IMP, Chaos, Ethernet?

RE: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Fred Cisin via cctalk]

On Fri, 27 Apr 2018, W2HX via cctalk wrote:
All that "fragmentation" to me was wonderful. Different models, 
different capabilities it was magical!


There are two different interpretations of "fragmentation".
Both are implicitly negative.
"Any color you want, as long as it is black" (1909) saves the company a 
LOT of money, by only having one model.


1) Overlapping product lines.  Such as Toyota Corolla and Camry, or 
Honda Civic and Accord, or TRS80 Model 1 and 2, or model 1 and Coco, or 
Model 100 and pocket computer(s).
Company competes against itself, and can never manage to claim "best 
selling model".


2) TOO diverse.  Such as Toyota Prius and Diesel Tundra pickup, or Honda 
Unicub/U3x and Ridgeline, or Coco and Model 16
Company has to support too many different things, and might not ever 
develop the expertise in some of the lines.


(The Honda N600 that I mentioned earlier was a motorcycle engine and 
transmission design.  The previous S600/S800 was two seater sports car 
(looked British), with dual overhead cam, roller crank, roller wrist pins, 
roller distributor shaft bushings, etc. At more than 9.5K redline, it got 
60+HP out of 600cc/36cubic-inch.  And constant tinkering.  Meanwhile, the 
Toyota S800 looked similar, but had essentially a lawnmower engine.)



There is a fine line between not having what a specific customer needs V 
making them make choices.


Radio Shack made some mistakes.  Ranging from not having the 80x24 and 
full memory management for CP/M in the Model 1 (not fixed until Model 
FOUR), to not having a "100% compatible" PC quickly enough.  They were not 
the only ones to think that making a "better" compatible machine would be 
preferable to making a clone.  (cf. DEC Rainbow, Sirius/Victor 9000, TI 
Professional)
I don't know why the company went under.  I doubt that their computer line 
was the sole cause.


They had a good run, and we are the better for having experienced it.


--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez via cctalk]

Glen Slick via cctalk wrote:

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 8:23 PM, Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez via cctalk
 wrote:

Interesting.  HP made ISA card versions of early (or actually, pre-)
HP9000-300 that were designated as "Basic Language Processors", hosting a
68000 and having GPIB I/O.  Interesting beasts. I believe that they were
able to take control of the ISA bus for at least some functions; they were
fast for their time, and it was easy to share GPIB-acquired data with the
MSDOS world.

The HP 82324A coprocessor card wasn't an ISA bus master card. Software
running on the host PC implemented some of the I/O interface. When
software on the coprocessor card made some I/O accesses the
coprocessor card could be frozen while software running on the host PC
completed the I/O access.

Hewlett-Packard Journal, April 1992
http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1992-04.pdf
Page 110, A High-Performance Measurement Coprocessor for Personal Computers
This article describes the second and faster version of the card based
on the 68030.

Thank you, I stand corrected!

carlos.

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez via cctalk]

W2HX via cctalk wrote:

The first personal computer I ever came in contact with was the TRS-80 Model 1 
(Level II) at a friend of my father's in Long Island around 1979. I learned to 
program basic at his house and practiced during the summer at my junior high 
school that had a few Model 1's for kids to work with. The school let me come 
in and play.

With my Bar Mitzvah money in 1980 I bought my first computer, TRS-80 model III 
(I think it cost me $1200).  I learned a LOT on that machine. I belonged to 
LICA (long island computer association) and one of the guys there operated a 
TRS-80 business computer. I can't remember what model, (II, 12, 16, etc) but it 
ran Xenix. He had 2 modems and two phone lines at his house connected to it and 
granted access to club members. I built a micromint 300 baud acoustic coupler 
kit, connected my TRS-80 Model III to the phone and over to his Xenix machine.

I was hooked and learn a LOT about *nix style operating systems spending HOURS 
tying up the only phone line in our house connected to it. Really formative 
years for me.

When I left for college, I brought with me the TRS-80 4P. Nice little machine, 
did all my papers on it.

All that "fragmentation" to me was wonderful. Different models, different 
capabilities it was magical!

73 Eugene W2HX

I see that the actual fragmentation is about how each and everyone got 
in touch with computers, personal or mainframe or whatever! Me, I was in 
junior high and usually understood everything in the math class by the 
first 15 minutes, after which I would become restless (bored) and the 
teacher would send me several buildings away to inquire about the room 
temperature of the computer room, which hosted an HP3000 system with 
several terminals (that included primitive graphics capabilities via 
serial connection!).  It was 1978, and I learned BASIC right there. 
Afterwards, it was Apple II and their Franklin clones as a freshman, 
running UCSD Pascal... in 1982.  Later it was the Z80 card in the same 
computers, running CPM, but just for the sake of using the Z80 assembler 
tools.  And we were using also the said Apple II to impersonate card 
readers that would send jobs to the IBM 4381, as a sophomore... My dad 
bought me an HP71B calculator in 1984, and that really was when my 
numerical math skills progressed.  I still do that for a living.  And 
the height of my BS years... getting to run MATLAB in an IBM-AT with a 
math co-processor.  Later, as a teacher, getting my first BITNET email 
account in 1987, learning XENIX, wiring phonenet for the Mac network at 
the university, then as a grad student (1989) using VAX machines at 
UW-Madison, but also Apollo machines, Sun 4/50  machines, and HP-300 
machines... and in1990, I telnet-ed to UCSD to run jobs in a Cray at 
UCSD...  whoa, such memories...


Carlos.

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Glen Slick via cctalk]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 8:23 PM, Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Interesting.  HP made ISA card versions of early (or actually, pre-)
> HP9000-300 that were designated as "Basic Language Processors", hosting a
> 68000 and having GPIB I/O.  Interesting beasts. I believe that they were
> able to take control of the ISA bus for at least some functions; they were
> fast for their time, and it was easy to share GPIB-acquired data with the
> MSDOS world.

The HP 82324A coprocessor card wasn't an ISA bus master card. Software
running on the host PC implemented some of the I/O interface. When
software on the coprocessor card made some I/O accesses the
coprocessor card could be frozen while software running on the host PC
completed the I/O access.

Hewlett-Packard Journal, April 1992
http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1992-04.pdf
Page 110, A High-Performance Measurement Coprocessor for Personal Computers
This article describes the second and faster version of the card based
on the 68030.

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez via cctalk]

Eric Smith via cctalk wrote:

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 15:59 Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:


I believe the Z-80 was subordinate to the M68K.

In high-level conceptual term, maybe, depending on the software.

In term of the actual capabilities of the hardware, the Z80 was firmly in
control of _everything_ in the machine, including control over the MC68000,
while the MC68000 had no direct control over anything but its MMU (built
from TTL) and memory. If code running on the MC68000 wants to talk to
anything at all, disk, tape, console, printer, serial ports, etc., all it
can do is politely request that of the Z80. In that sense it's like the CPU
of a CDC 6600, which can't do anything without the PPUs

Interesting.  HP made ISA card versions of early (or actually, pre-)  
HP9000-300 that were designated as "Basic Language Processors", hosting 
a 68000 and having GPIB I/O.  Interesting beasts. I believe that they 
were able to take control of the ISA bus for at least some functions; 
they were fast for their time, and it was easy to share GPIB-acquired 
data with the MSDOS world.

RE: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[W2HX via cctalk]

The first personal computer I ever came in contact with was the TRS-80 Model 1 
(Level II) at a friend of my father's in Long Island around 1979. I learned to 
program basic at his house and practiced during the summer at my junior high 
school that had a few Model 1's for kids to work with. The school let me come 
in and play.

With my Bar Mitzvah money in 1980 I bought my first computer, TRS-80 model III 
(I think it cost me $1200).  I learned a LOT on that machine. I belonged to 
LICA (long island computer association) and one of the guys there operated a 
TRS-80 business computer. I can't remember what model, (II, 12, 16, etc) but it 
ran Xenix. He had 2 modems and two phone lines at his house connected to it and 
granted access to club members. I built a micromint 300 baud acoustic coupler 
kit, connected my TRS-80 Model III to the phone and over to his Xenix machine. 

I was hooked and learn a LOT about *nix style operating systems spending HOURS 
tying up the only phone line in our house connected to it. Really formative 
years for me.

When I left for college, I brought with me the TRS-80 4P. Nice little machine, 
did all my papers on it.

All that "fragmentation" to me was wonderful. Different models, different 
capabilities it was magical!

73 Eugene W2HX

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Geoffrey Oltmans via cctalk]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 7:18 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

>
> D'ya mean like an automobile company making more than one model?  Surely
> there is no need for Toyota to make both a Corolla AND a Camry!
>
>
Hmm... not really sure about that comparison. After all, it's not like the
Corolla and Camry need different fuel and/or travel on separate roads.
Plus, I expect that despite their many differences there are probably quite
a few fundamental similarities (similar stereos, HVAC controls, brake
components, etc).

The Model 1 was a wild venture into a field that they knew little about,
> and didn't know what to expect.
> Ask Allison about what they expected.
> It turned out that what they made was surprisingly close to correct for
> people like US.
> Well, other than 16 lines by 64 characters of B&W, and a memory map that
> was not compatible with CP/M.
>

I guess they fixed that by the time the 4 came along.



> But what about pocket computers, PDAs, calculators?  Have to come out with
> some offerings there.
>

Well, like I said before. I think you could easily dismiss the calculators
and PDAs, since they were more of an appliance (i.e. create text documents
that are easily interchangeable with other machines). Heck even a lot of
the early PDAs could create spreadsheets that were compatible with Lotus
1-2-3, even moreso in some cases they were built in applications.


>
> Would they have been more successful if the model 2000 had been a PC
> clone, instead of "better than"?
>

Well, in some respects they eventually managed to do that with the Tandy
1000s... some incompatibilities aside.

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Fred Cisin via cctalk]

TRS-80 Model II and 16, 68k based "business" machines

The Models II and 12 were Z80 based machines. The models 16 and 6000 were the 
same Z80 based machines with 68k subsystems added via additional cards to allow 
them to run Xenix.

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018, Geoff Oltmans via cctalk wrote:

D'oh!  I knew that. But still, even more fragmentation...


And, don't forget the Tandy 10!   (oops, too late, already forgotten)
1978, built by ADDS (Applied Digital Data Systems)
$8995
8080
48K RAM 
2 8" drives

ADOS

Did they sell enough of them to recoup the cost of the product 
announcement?

Re: Visiting Boston - Classic computer recommendations (Huw Davies)

[Michael Thompson via cctalk]

>
> Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2018 19:17:18 +1000
> From: Huw Davies 
> Subject: Visiting Boston - Classic computer recommendations
>
> I?m in Boston MA (technically Canton) for the next three weeks (April 29
> to May 19). Looking for recommendations on classic computer/classic
> car/sailing things of interest to do on the weekends.
>
> Huw Davies   | e-mail: huw.dav...@kerberos.davies.net.au
> Melbourne| "If soccer was meant to be played in the
> Australia| air, the sky would be painted green"
>
>
Please visit us at the Rhode Island Computer Museum. About 60 miles south
of boaton.
http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/

We will be working in the Learning Lab on Saturdays, and can take you to
the warehouse for a tour of the static storage.

There are classic car museums not far away in Newport and Middletown, and
lots of sail boats in Newport.

-- 
Michael Thompson

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Fred Cisin via cctalk]

I believe the Z-80 was subordinate to the M68K.


On Fri, 27 Apr 2018, Eric Smith via cctalk wrote:

In high-level conceptual term, maybe, depending on the software.
In term of the actual capabilities of the hardware, the Z80 was firmly in
control of _everything_ in the machine, including control over the MC68000,
while the MC68000 had no direct control over anything but its MMU (built
from TTL) and memory. If code running on the MC68000 wants to talk to
anything at all, disk, tape, console, printer, serial ports, etc., all it
can do is politely request that of the Z80. In that sense it's like the CPU
of a CDC 6600, which can't do anything without the PPUs


So, the Z80 ran CP/M and TRS-DOS, functioning as in I/O coprocessor for 
the 68000, . . .


As in small business, which is "subordinate",
engineering or administration?


A friend of a friend was very proud of his Z80/68000 Cromemco.  He was a 
little offended when I compared it to the Radio Shack Model 16.

Re: Looking for Heath H-29 operation manual and schematic

[Fritz Mueller via cctalk]

Al, following up on this thread from February, in case you are still looking, I 
just came across my copies of:

  - Z-29 Uers's & Technical Guide (1983)
  - Z-29 ASCII character and escape code chart

Despite the claim to be a "Technical" guide, the above is really more of a user 
manual, containing in-depth description of control codes and operating modes, 
but not much else (no circuit descriptions nor schematics).

I'll be showing at VCF West in August, and happy to bring these along and 
donate them to the scan queue if you are still looking for them?

  cheers,
--FritzM.

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Eric Smith via cctalk]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 15:59 Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> I believe the Z-80 was subordinate to the M68K.


In high-level conceptual term, maybe, depending on the software.

In term of the actual capabilities of the hardware, the Z80 was firmly in
control of _everything_ in the machine, including control over the MC68000,
while the MC68000 had no direct control over anything but its MMU (built
from TTL) and memory. If code running on the MC68000 wants to talk to
anything at all, disk, tape, console, printer, serial ports, etc., all it
can do is politely request that of the Z80. In that sense it's like the CPU
of a CDC 6600, which can't do anything without the PPUs

The Model 16 was developed
> independently of the Model II.


The Model 16 was developed as an expansion of the already-existing Model
II, with a few other changes like half-height floppy drives that were later
implemented on the Model 12 also.

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Fred Cisin via cctalk]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018, Geoffrey Oltmans via cctalk wrote:

common architecture. Do you think that if they had, say, revised and
extended the Model I system to color/80 column that the rest would have
been mostly redundant?


D'ya mean like an automobile company making more than one model?  Surely 
there is no need for Toyota to make both a Corolla AND a Camry!


The Model 1 was a wild venture into a field that they knew little about, 
and didn't know what to expect.

Ask Allison about what they expected.
It turned out that what they made was surprisingly close to correct for 
people like US.
Well, other than 16 lines by 64 characters of B&W, and a memory map that 
was not compatible with CP/M.



But, that's not where they would expect the big money to be.

So, they made a bigger "business" computer, the Model 2, with 8" drives.
It could even run CP/M, for those who didn't appreciate Model 2 TRS-DOS 
(which is NOT closely related to TRS-DOS (by Randy Cook))



Then they upgraded the model 1 to reduce the cords and cables, and made 
the Model 3.  I don't know whether the resemblance to the Northstar 
Dimension was deliberate.


They made a 68000 co-processor for the Model 2, creating the models 12 and 
16.


They needed a low-end machine with color, games, cartridges, etc. 
Following a Motorola applicatoin note, they made the "Color Computer".
Since it was solely for games, etc., and not intended to compete with 
their other models [HA!], there was "no need" for 80 column, no need for 
composite video, no need for a decent keyboard, . . .


But what about pocket computers, PDAs, calculators?  Have to come out with 
some offerings there.


Howzbout a tablet of some sort, for wannabe journalists?  Kyoto Ceramics 
had just the thing, ready for re-branding.


Oh, and then they modified the Model 3.  The Model 4 is the same, EXCEPT:
80x24 video, a "Control key" on the keyboard, memory map with RAM all the 
way, so it can run CP/M, AND, they changed it from battleship gray (they 
called that "Mercedes Silver") to white.


Model 4P is same, in a luggable case.
(The Elcompco earliest machines were a model 3 motherboard in a 
Halliburton attache case, until the 5150 came out)



Frankly, although I agree that they made MANY mistakes (such as not doing 
the 80x24 upgrade a lot earlier!), I think that it was a fairly reasonable 
suite of models.


Would they have been more successful if the model 2000 had been a PC 
clone, instead of "better than"?



--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Geoff Oltmans via cctalk]

> On Apr 26, 2018, at 4:51 PM, Mark J. Blair via cctalk  
> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Apr 26, 2018, at 14:25, Geoffrey Oltmans via cctalk 
>>  wrote:
>> 
>> TRS-80 Model II and 16, 68k based "business" machines
> 
> The Models II and 12 were Z80 based machines. The models 16 and 6000 were the 
> same Z80 based machines with 68k subsystems added via additional cards to 
> allow them to run Xenix.

D'oh!  I knew that. But still, even more fragmentation... 

Re: Amusing IBM test system model

[Ed Sharpe via cctalk]

SMECC  WOULD BE INTERESTED IN ALL  Thanks  Ed
 
In a message dated 4/22/2018 10:22:49 PM US Mountain Standard Time, 
cctalk@classiccmp.org writes:

 
 I also have a few others listed:

ADINTS
https://www.ebay.com/itm/132588526929

IBM 1401/707
https://www.ebay.com/itm/132581434367

IBM System/3
https://www.ebay.com/itm/132593475814

Yet to be listed is a 650 and 2 suitcases of System/360 Model 70 models used in 
the 1964 Worlds Fair.

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Ed Sharpe via cctalk]

I do have a workslate!   Odd   portable...  Thin we  have a printer too  for it?
Ed#  www.smecc.org 
 
In a message dated 4/26/2018 2:56:41 PM US Mountain Standard Time, 
cctalk@classiccmp.org writes:

 
 > > TRS-80 Model 100, 102, 200 (rebadged Kyoceras)

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018, Ed Sharpe via cctalk wrote:
> But... i have   yet  to see a  Kyocera...   Ed#

NEC 8201, Olivetti M10 were more of the Kyoto Ceramics machines.
NEC was about 3/8" thicker, but had much more expansion capability.
8085, 8x40 LCD,

Competing unrelated machines included the Epson HC-20 (painted gray and 
katakana character set removed for the US HX-20) 4x20 6301, and later the 
Workslate (spreadsheet oriented machine!)

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Fred Cisin via cctalk]

I had to choose between buying not skimping on groceries V a Mini-Cooper-S
(needed a little work) V Honda 600 V TRS80.  Did I make the right choice?


On Thu, 26 Apr 2018, Liam Proven wrote:

I'd go for a bike over a car any day. Well, when I was young, anyway. Now,
I'm getting kinda stiff and creaky... Because of all the bike crashes and
the scar tissue.


The Honda 600 was NOT a bike. Well, mostly not.  After demise of the mid 
1960s Honda S600/S800 ("poor-man's-Ferrari" design exercise that got out 
of hand and went into production), Honda engineers took a 360CC parallel 
twin, detuned it and upped it to 600cc, added a differential, and a 
reverse (tacked on to the outside of the case), and put it in a car body 
that resembled the Mini.  AN600 was the first Hondas officially imported 
into USA (1970).  A later Z600 had a "sportier" body, and one was cut in 
half in the down-under movie "Malcolm"




Later, I bought a used Yamaha MSX (from Mitchell Waite) for him.

I never got into MSX. They ended up very impressive by the MSX2+ era.


He was into music, and wanted MIDI, etc.
And, of course, he never mastered conversion of the Ensoniq Mirage disks.
(each track had 1024 byte sectors numbered 0 through 4, and a 512 byte 
sector #5)



Then he bought a Mindset.

Mindset?
Obscure 80186 MS-DOS machine with interesting graphics innovations and no 
market.  Designed by es-Atari engineers.

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[allison via cctalk]

On 04/26/2018 05:58 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
>
> On 04/26/2018 05:51 PM, Mark J. Blair via cctalk wrote:
>>> On Apr 26, 2018, at 14:25, Geoffrey Oltmans via cctalk 
>>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> TRS-80 Model II and 16, 68k based "business" machines
>> The Models II and 12 were Z80 based machines. The models 16 and 6000 were 
>> the same Z80 based machines with 68k subsystems added via additional cards 
>> to allow them to run Xenix.
> I believe the Z-80 was subordinate to the M68K.
THe reason for that is the 68K was available long after the Z80 (about 4
years).
So the base TRS-80 had already evolved to the Mod-II by then.

>    The Model 16 was developed
> independently of the Model II.  While Tandy had a version of Xenix to 
> sell for it
> it shipped with TRSDOS-16.  It also ran CP/M-68K rather nicely.  It was 
> a good
> machine destined to die when Tandy decided not to be a computer company.
That and the base TRS 80 both saturated the market and also left many with a
bad taste when it came to expansion... least till they sorted it out.

I'd left there before long before it imploded.


Allison


> bill
>
>

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 23:30, Geoffrey Oltmans  wrote:


> I don't know what it's like around your home, but most places in the US
aren't terribly bike friendly. Since the advent of texting and smart phones
even less so. Still, I keep thinking I should trade my one way 4 mile car
commute for a bike ride... my fear of being struck while riding on a short
half mile long section of limited sight distance hilly roads between home
and work gives me some pause. We are starting to get some bike lanes and
more bike friendly roadways around here though (as well as some paved
greenways).

Well, since Fred stipulated a Honda 600, I took him to mean a motorbike.

But I rarely ride those now, whereas I cycle  a lot.

I live in central Prague, Czechia, which is _extremely_ bike-unfriendly.
It's even worse than London. But I do the 4 miles to work, and 4 miles
back, most days in the summer.

> I did in my younger days bike extensively around town, not so much
anymore since I've got kids and a wife that count on me. :)

No wife, although working on it, no kids, but still... if I didn't bike,
I'd be even less fit and so less likely to stick around long.

I've been in 1 bad bicycle crash (compound comminuted Colley fracture right
ulna & radius), 1 bad motorcycle crash (multiple breaks to left ankle,
tibia, fibula, femur and hip, fracture to right shoulder, dislocated left
shoulder, whiplash), but I still ride both when I can.


-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 19:54, Geoff Oltmans  wrote:

> I think you'd find a few people this side of the pond whose first
computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000 (our equivalent of the ZX81). I know
that was true in our household... My dad purchased one brand-new at
Albertson's (a supermarket chain in the southeast US) for $100. We were
enamored with it instantly despite its obvious drawbacks

:-) I'm pleased to hear this.

> and that eventually led to the purchase of a more capable machine, the TI
99/4a. Unfortunately much to my dads chagrin that happening just a few
months before its drastic price cut and eventual discontinuation.

Now there was a machine that suffered an ill-deserved fate. Mind you, if TI
hadn't crippled it as they did, maybe it could have competed more
effectively with the CBM machines without the vicious price drops.

> RIP. Definitely a very influential machine worldwide and an effort worth
feeling proud of.

Yes indeed.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 16:55, Zane Healy  wrote:

> My first computer was supposed to be a ZX81.  I worked all Summer
painting the house to earn it.  As it happens, my payment was a VIC-20 with
a tape recorder.

I guess the VIC had colour and sound, but that 22-column screen always
looked too much like one of those first-generation Atari consoles to me. I
never could get past that too-chunky text.

Nowadays, looking back, the computer I _would_ have wanted from that era
was the Acorn Atom...

> The ZX Spectrum has always fascinated me, and nearly 20 years ago, I
traded a Tek cartridge with a list member for a ZX Spectrum 2+.  I still
dream of having time to get that system up and running.  Even though I’ve
never run it, it’s still one of my favorite pieces in my collection.

There are two different models of +2 -- the grey +2 and the black +2A.

The +2 -- I have one myself -- is the Sinclair PCB in an Amstrad case. It
is basically 100% compatible with a real Sinclair Research 128K+.

The +2A is a cut-down Amstrad Spectrum +3, with the disk interface removed.
Amstrad promised an add-on disk interface, the "SI-1", but never made one.
Now, remarkably, there's a 3rd party one:
https://www.8bits4ever.net/product-page/sdi-1

An essential addon for any +2A! :-D

So it depends which one you have.

There are lots of resources for getting them working again -- some people
might even be on this list. There are replacement ULA chips, circuit
diagrams, ROM disassemblies, everything you could want.

This is the single most impressive Spectrum-based modification I've seen,
adding 64-column text, high density floppy drives, CP/M compatibility and a
switchable faster CPU:
https://www.secarica.ro/index.php/en/zx-zone/plus3-hardware/the-plus3s-project

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Bill Gunshannon via cctalk]

On 04/26/2018 05:51 PM, Mark J. Blair via cctalk wrote:
>> On Apr 26, 2018, at 14:25, Geoffrey Oltmans via cctalk 
>>  wrote:
>>
>> TRS-80 Model II and 16, 68k based "business" machines
> The Models II and 12 were Z80 based machines. The models 16 and 6000 were the 
> same Z80 based machines with 68k subsystems added via additional cards to 
> allow them to run Xenix.

I believe the Z-80 was subordinate to the M68K.   The Model 16 was developed
independently of the Model II.  While Tandy had a version of Xenix to 
sell for it
it shipped with TRSDOS-16.  It also ran CP/M-68K rather nicely.  It was 
a good
machine destined to die when Tandy decided not to be a computer company.

bill

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Fred Cisin via cctalk]

> TRS-80 Model 100, 102, 200 (rebadged Kyoceras)


On Thu, 26 Apr 2018, Ed Sharpe via cctalk wrote:

But... i have   yet  to see a  Kyocera...   Ed#


NEC 8201, Olivetti M10  were more of the Kyoto Ceramics machines.
NEC was about 3/8" thicker, but had much more expansion capability.
8085, 8x40 LCD,

Competing unrelated machines included the Epson HC-20 (painted gray and 
katakana character set removed for the US HX-20) 4x20 6301, and later the 
Workslate (spreadsheet oriented machine!)

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Mark J. Blair via cctalk]

> On Apr 26, 2018, at 14:25, Geoffrey Oltmans via cctalk 
>  wrote:
> 
> TRS-80 Model II and 16, 68k based "business" machines

The Models II and 12 were Z80 based machines. The models 16 and 6000 were the 
same Z80 based machines with 68k subsystems added via additional cards to allow 
them to run Xenix.

Re: TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Ed Sharpe via cctalk]

But... i have   yet  to see a  Kyocera...   Ed#
 
In a message dated 4/26/2018 2:25:47 PM US Mountain Standard Time, 
cctalk@classiccmp.org writes:

 
TRS-80 Model 100, 102, 200 (rebadged Kyoceras)

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Geoffrey Oltmans via cctalk]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 4:15 PM, Liam Proven via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 23:04, Fred Cisin via cctalk  >
> wrote:
>
> I'd go for a bike over a car any day. Well, when I was young, anyway. Now,
> I'm getting kinda stiff and creaky... Because of all the bike crashes and
> the scar tissue.
>

I don't know what it's like around your home, but most places in the US
aren't terribly bike friendly. Since the advent of texting and smart phones
even less so. Still, I keep thinking I should trade my one way 4 mile car
commute for a bike ride... my fear of being struck while riding on a short
half mile long section of limited sight distance hilly roads between home
and work gives me some pause. We are starting to get some bike lanes and
more bike friendly roadways around here though (as well as some paved
greenways).

I did in my younger days bike extensively around town, not so much anymore
since I've got kids and a wife that count on me. :)

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Adrian Graham via cctalk]

> On 26 Apr 2018, at 22:13, Eric Smith via cctalk  wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 3:11 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <
> cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, 26 Apr 2018, Eric Smith via cctalk wrote:
>> 
>>> Those Microdrives were such a Cheese design.
>>> 
>> 
>> The American Cheese Society (industry association) would probably resent
>> that comparison
> 
> 
> I was referring to a different, non-comestible Cheese. What I stated about
> the Microdrives was literally true, not a metaphor.


From my own Sinclair page 
(http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Sinclair/index.php 
): 

"Interesting, if sad, trivia: courtesy of Andrew Owen comes a sad note - Ben 
Cheese, one of the QL Engineers has passed on.a small reminder of Ben is in 
this paragraph:
>The Microdrives whirred at different speeds too. If you took eight,
carefully selected for tone, and hooked them up to a QL (I guess an
Interface 1 would do just as well, but never saw it) you could play tunes by
turning the appropriate motors off and on. Christmas carols were popular...
this particular silliness was cooked up by Ben Cheese, an incredibly
talented and even more incredibly nice chap who was one of the QL engineers.
He also did mildly subversive cartoons for the Sinclair in-house newsletter
(WHAM!, or What's Happening At Milton), and played saxophone. With Shakatak,
on one occasion. He went on to work at Flare with some other SInclair
engineers (Martin Brennan and John Mc… um*), who had their own Z80
Spectrumalike for a while, then did various oddities including the Atari
Jaguar  and a disk 
drive chip for Amstrad that fully explored various
out-of-spec conditions in the ASIC process used to fab it."
(*John Mathieson)

-- 
adrian/witchy
Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest home computer collection?
t: @binarydinosaursf: facebook.com/binarydinosaurs
w: www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk

TRS-80 Fragmentation

[Geoffrey Oltmans via cctalk]

It is obvious that the TRS-80 line of computers suffered severe
fragmentation with differing architectures:

TRS-80 Model I, III, and 4(P) are all obviously of a mostly compatible
architecture.
TRS-80 Model II and 16, 68k based "business" machines
TRS-80 CoCo I, II, III (Dragon)
TRS-80 PC-x, various rebadged machines from Sharp, Panasonic, or Casio
TRS-80 MC-10 (a Matra Alice)
TRS-80 Model 100, 102, 200 (rebadged Kyoceras)

So, obviously there were several good sellers in there, and of course for
every good seller there's at least one bad seller. The PC line were mostly
replacements for calculators that were programmable, and the Model 100
derivatives were mostly used as appliances rather than general purpose
machines. Aside from that, it seems like Tandy more than most went off in
the weeds with their own wide variety of machines instead of settling on a
common architecture. Do you think that if they had, say, revised and
extended the Model I system to color/80 column that the rest would have
been mostly redundant?

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 23:04, Fred Cisin via cctalk 
wrote:


> Neither "first", nor "sub-$1000"
> Apple][ was $1298, and discounts were very rare.
> TRS-80 at $599 was less than half the price.
> Pet at $795 was barely more than half the price.

The TRS-80 line barely sold over here, so I tend to forget them.

But perhaps I have incorrectly remembered what the Apple II was marketed as.

> Not all americans are nor were idly wealthy.
> The day before I bought my TRS80 was a typical 14 hour work day, with rice
> and beans for dinner.
> I had to choose between buying not skimping on groceries V a Mini-Cooper-S
> (needed a little work) V Honda 600 V TRS80.  Did I make the right choice?

I'd go for a bike over a car any day. Well, when I was young, anyway. Now,
I'm getting kinda stiff and creaky... Because of all the bike crashes and
the scar tissue.

> But, exchange rate in those days was about 2:1!
> You dealt with extreme markups, with many machines selling there for the
> same number of pounds as their dollar price in USA!
> ~$500 GBP for TRS80, >1000 GBP for Apple
> are twice what the MSRP should have been.

Oh yes.

There was a Mac dealer who undercut Apple UK by literally sending an
employee to New York, walk on fare, who bought the Mac of your choice at
retail, flew back with it, and delivered it to you.

Not kidding.

> Timex/Sinclair was $100, in keeping with the same industry specific
> exchange rate that was gouging y'all.
> It was amazing how much they accomplished with so little.

Yep.

> It had a picture of a keyboard on top, (as a suggested expansion?)

Mean!

It worked. Not well, but it worked. No worse than an Atari 400 keyboard --
the same design.

> I got my assistant ("VP Of Marketing") a Timex.

:-)

> Later, I bought a used Yamaha MSX (from Mitchell Waite) for him.
> Then he bought a Mindset.

I never got into MSX. They ended up very impressive by the MSX2+ era.

Mindset?

> Here, also, Sinclair was a popular first computer for people who didn't
> want to spend a significant part of their income for a computer, (and for
> kids without wealthy parents)

Conceded.

> Some Macs have been made into aquariums.
> PCs can have individual parts upgraded for decades.
> But, the Sinclair needed no work to be repurposed as an elegant doorstop.

Harsh, but not new...
-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Eric Smith via cctalk]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 3:11 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Apr 2018, Eric Smith via cctalk wrote:
>
>> Those Microdrives were such a Cheese design.
>>
>
> The American Cheese Society (industry association) would probably resent
> that comparison


I was referring to a different, non-comestible Cheese. What I stated about
the Microdrives was literally true, not a metaphor.

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Eric Smith via cctalk]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 3:03 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Apple][ was $1298, and discounts were very rare.
> TRS-80 at $599 was less than half the price.
> Pet at $795 was barely more than half the price.
>

By connecting a CCTV monitor, I got my TRS80 new for $399.
>

The Apple II at $1298 didn't include a monitor, either, so it was actually
closer to $1500 when compared to the $599 TRS-80 or $795 PET.  One could
argue that the buyer did get significant additional value with the Apple II
in some regards, but if you were on a tight budget, the Apple II wasn't the
right machine.

By the US govt's figures, $1298 back then is equivalent to $5310 today.
Even if it was mostly better than the competition, how many of us would be
able to buy a $5300 computer today?

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Fred Cisin via cctalk]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018, Eric Smith via cctalk wrote:

Those Microdrives were such a Cheese design.


The American Cheese Society (industry association) would probably resent 
that comparison.

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 22:41, TeoZ via cctalk  wrote:

> My first computer was a Timex 2068 just before Timex got out of
computers. I
> had seen advertisements for the 1000 model but it looked like junk at the
> time (no real keyboard, you needed to have the 16K RAM cart to do
anything).
> Still the 1000 was CHEAP.

It was, but very limited. The UK model had 1 kB of RAM, no sound, no
graphics, no colour, 32*20 text, and a limited 8 kB ROM BASIC. Expansion at
the time was limited to a tiny cash-register-style printer and a 16 kB RAM
expansion, and that was it.

The Spectrum had 48 kB RAM, a slightly more flexible 16 kB BASIC with
graphics and sound commands, 256*192 graphics in 16 colours (kinda), and
could drive disk drives, printers, joysticks, modems, whatever you could
want.

For me, more interested in programming than games, it was better than a C64
-- the 64 was expensive in the UK, its disk drive slow and also expensive,
and its BASIC was rubbish. Better keyboard, though, and yes, much better
sound and graphics.

The big limitation of the Spectrum was the piezo beeper sound and the
limited graphics. The TS2068 fixed both: it added a AY-3-8910 sound chip, 2
more screen modes (512*192 and 256*192 with 32*192 colour resolution
instead of the Spectrum's 32*22) -- and the ROM could be paged out to run
CP/M.

It's a tragedy that Sinclar never adopted those enhancements for the
Spectrum 128... or that Amstrad didn't merge the Spectrum and CPC lines
when it bought the Sinclair product line.

> When I vacationed in Greece for a summer between HS  and college in the
80's
> I remember seeing all the advertisements for the Sinclair models with the
> wafer drives and thought they were cool looking. I think I even seen a few
> real models at the airport shops.

Yep, probably.

But I'm told the Spectrum never made a profit for Sinclair Research,
whereas the ZX81 was very lucrative for them.

> Still using anything other then a disk drive was a pain

True.

> and that device
> seemed too expensive for Europe at that time.

Yep. :-(

> Even after I promptly purchased a used C64 from a friend I still looked at
> the mailing lists for Timex/Sinclair products sold out of NYC shops. They
> had all kinds of add-ons and some software to make the units workable but
> most of it was for the 1000 model which must have sold quite a few units
> before being discontinued compared to my 2068.

Apparently so!

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Eric Smith via cctalk]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 2:37 PM, Liam Proven via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> The QL was a weird machine. It predated the Mac by a matter of weeks and in
> crude spec terms was comparable -- 128 kB RAM, 68008 vs 68000, 2 x 100 kB
> Microdrives versus 1 x 400 kB floppy. The QL did sound and colour, mind.
>

Those Microdrives were such a Cheese design.

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Fred Cisin via cctalk]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:

A lengthy interview with the later great Rick Dickinson, product designer
of basically every Sinclair computer, who sadly died of cancer on Tuesday.
https://medium.com/@ghalfacree/an-interview-with-rick-dickinson-3fea60537338
He not only did the ZX 80, ZX 81, ZX Spectrum and the QL, but also the Z88,
the Spectrum Next and others -- along with a lot of other stuff.

I know this is a rather USA-centric list, so probably most of you started
off with things like the Apple II, the first sub-$1000 home computer.


Neither "first", nor "sub-$1000"
Apple][ was $1298, and discounts were very rare.
TRS-80 at $599 was less than half the price.
Pet at $795 was barely more than half the price.

Two price factors need to be considered:
MSRP V street price
entry price (VERY significant for US) V price by the time it was fully 
equipped.

By connecting a CCTV monitor, I got my TRS80 new for $399.

"First" of course, involves date of announcement, date of working 
prototype, date of release (and order acceptance), date of first 
deliveries, date of first availability without pre-order.


Apple, TRS80, PET overlapped on all of those, and should reasonably be 
considered to be simultaneous.


But in Britain and Europe back then, we were a lot poorer, and $1000 was 
an impossibly large amount of money -- many months of pay in a good job.


Not all americans are nor were idly wealthy.
The day before I bought my TRS80 was a typical 14 hour work day, with rice 
and beans for dinner.
I had to choose between buying not skimping on groceries V a Mini-Cooper-S 
(needed a little work) V Honda 600 V TRS80.  Did I make the right choice?


But, exchange rate in those days was about 2:1!
You dealt with extreme markups, with many machines selling there for the 
same number of pounds as their dollar price in USA!

~$500 GBP for TRS80, >1000 GBP for Apple
are twice what the MSRP should have been.



In the UK, the revolution was the first sub-£100 home computer, the ZX 81.


Timex/Sinclair was $100, in keeping with the same industry specific 
exchange rate that was gouging y'all.

It was amazing how much they accomplished with so little.
It had a picture of a keyboard on top, (as a suggested expansion?)
I got my assistant ("VP Of Marketing") a Timex.

Later, I bought a used Yamaha MSX (from Mitchell Waite) for him.
Then he bought a Mindset.


Here, also, Sinclair was a popular first computer for people who didn't 
want to spend a significant part of their income for a computer, (and for 
kids without wealthy parents)



Some Macs have been made into aquariums.
PCs can have individual parts upgraded for decades.
But, the Sinclair needed no work to be repurposed as an elegant doorstop.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[TeoZ via cctalk]

My first computer was a Timex 2068 just before Timex got out of computers. I 
had seen advertisements for the 1000 model but it looked like junk at the 
time (no real keyboard, you needed to have the 16K RAM cart to do anything). 
Still the 1000 was CHEAP.


When I vacationed in Greece for a summer between HS  and college in the 80's 
I remember seeing all the advertisements for the Sinclair models with the 
wafer drives and thought they were cool looking. I think I even seen a few 
real models at the airport shops.


Still using anything other then a disk drive was a pain and that device 
seemed too expensive for Europe at that time.


Even after I promptly purchased a used C64 from a friend I still looked at 
the mailing lists for Timex/Sinclair products sold out of NYC shops. They 
had all kinds of add-ons and some software to make the units workable but 
most of it was for the 1000 model which must have sold quite a few units 
before being discontinued compared to my 2068.


-Original Message- 
From: Mark J. Blair via cctalk

Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2018 3:33 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

Over here in the US, I remember seeing the Sinclair QL in a magazine 
(probably Byte?) and thinking it looked exotic and interesting. I thought 
the little tape drives looked neat, and didn’t know enough to appreciate how 
much better a floppy drive would have made the system.


I have no regrets at all about getting an Amiga 1000 to take to college, and 
now I appreciate even better than then just how lucky I was. But to this 
day, I’d still like to play with a QL and get an idea of what it would have 
been like to head off to college with a shiny new one of those. There are a 
few other UK computers which I’m also curious about, since they’re not so 
common over here in the US.


--
Mark J. Blair 
http://www.nf6x.net


---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 21:33, Mark J. Blair via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Over here in the US, I remember seeing the Sinclair QL in a magazine
(probably Byte?) and thinking it looked exotic and interesting. I thought
the little tape drives looked neat, and didn’t know enough to appreciate
how much better a floppy drive would have made the system.

> I have no regrets at all about getting an Amiga 1000 to take to college,
and now I appreciate even better than then just how lucky I was. But to
this day, I’d still like to play with a QL and get an idea of what it would
have been like to head off to college with a shiny new one of those. There
are a few other UK computers which I’m also curious about, since they’re
not so common over here in the US.

Speaking of Byte, that reminds me -- I've put a bunch of Smalltalk-80
related material on Scribd, including Byte's August 1981 special on
Smalltalk.

https://www.scribd.com/user/38728867/Liam-Proven

The QL was a weird machine. It predated the Mac by a matter of weeks and in
crude spec terms was comparable -- 128 kB RAM, 68008 vs 68000, 2 x 100 kB
Microdrives versus 1 x 400 kB floppy. The QL did sound and colour, mind.

But Sinclair totally failed to spot that the next big thing was the GUI.
The QL didn't have one. It was an enhanced 1980s 8-bit -- with limited
colour and sound, limited storage and expansion, but a big flat memory
space (for the time), multitasking, a ROM BASIC and so on.

I tried to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the QL, the ST
and the Amiga here:
https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/46833.html

The Mac brought the GUI to the masses, albeit in far more limited form than
Xerox PARC had intended -- or even than the Lisa.

The Amiga added stunning multimedia to that, at a price, although still a
fraction of the Mac's.

The ST cut the Amiga's amazing abilities down to something more like the
Macs, but still offered better-than-any-8-bit graphics and sound, enough
for great games.

I looked at all of them and bought an Archimedes. :-D

FAR more CPU power than any of them, a pretty good GUI, an excellent BASIC
programming environment, and better sound and graphics than the ST, near
the Amiga's but not quite. It hit the sweet spot for me.

It was a _great_ machine, IMHO. But so was the Amiga, and so in its way was
the Mac and the ST.

The QL... not so much, I'm afraid.

But I remain intrigued by them. I am hoping to learn enough Object Pascal
that, via Ultibo, I can do a bare-metal QL emulator for the Raspberry Pi.
The QL had a very interesting, unique OS, and 2 forks of it are now FOSS.
I'd love to bring them to the Pi.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Mark J. Blair via cctalk]

Over here in the US, I remember seeing the Sinclair QL in a magazine (probably 
Byte?) and thinking it looked exotic and interesting. I thought the little tape 
drives looked neat, and didn’t know enough to appreciate how much better a 
floppy drive would have made the system.

I have no regrets at all about getting an Amiga 1000 to take to college, and 
now I appreciate even better than then just how lucky I was. But to this day, 
I’d still like to play with a QL and get an idea of what it would have been 
like to head off to college with a shiny new one of those. There are a few 
other UK computers which I’m also curious about, since they’re not so common 
over here in the US. 

--
Mark J. Blair 
http://www.nf6x.net

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 19:26, Adrian Graham via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> My first was a ZX80 which my Dad borrowed from my physics teacher at
school. That spurred me on to get my own ZX81 which had just come out, then
the Research Machines 380Z at later school, then the 48K ZXSpectrum.
Amazing little machines for the money but I never discovered the name of
the designer until much later.

Same here!

> You could’ve stopped after ‘flopped’ though the Oric went on to do very
well in France and the Dragon still has a good userbase today. Strictly
speaking they all do apart from the Lynx, but the Dragon is alive and well.
The biggest Enterprise group is still in Hungary where the unsold machines
were dumped after Enterprise Computers went bust in 1986.

I'm in the Hungarian Enterprise owners group on FB -- machine translation
is an amazing thing -- and I still hope to own one.

The Oric did relatively well, yes -- better than the Dragon. But neither
achieved more than a _fraction_ of the success of the Sinclair range, and
as for the others -- Camputers, Memotech, Jupiter, Newbrain, even
foreigners such as Mattel, Spectravideo, Sord -- they all put together
probably sold fewer than Sinclair.

In fact, I suspect that Sinclair and Commodore together outsold every other
home micro vendor put together. And there were a _lot_.

> Yep. RIP. I missed him doing ‘an evening with…’ last year at the Computer
Museum in Cambridge, naturally I thought there’d be another one.

:-(

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 19:17, j...@cimmeri.com  wrote:

> Very interesting to see this perspective from the UK!

Oh good. :-)

> Located in the U.S. (Washington, D.C), I started with an Apple II+ in
1979 as a 12 year old.

This confirms the sort of thing I read. US users had specifications of kit
we couldn't _dream_ of... big (for the time) high-end machines like the
Apple II and Atari 8-bits, with full-size full-travel keyboards, internal
expansion slots, monitors, floppy disk drives -- even multiple ones!

It took me years, as a teenaged university student, to save up enough to
add a disk interface and a single 5.25" DS/DD 80-track drive to my
Spectrum. That cost me about £150, and it gave me a Centronics printer
port, so I could add a Panasonic KX-P 1080 9-pin dot matrix printer --
another £75 or so.

I still used a portable TV, though. Monitors remained out of reach and the
Spectrum didn't even have a monitor port anyway.

Before that I struggled along with ZX Microdrives. I just bought a used
one, to try to 3D print replicas of the case, one for an SD card drive, one
for a Raspberry Pi...

They were crappy things -- 100 kB of not-very-reliable storage on an
endless tape loop in a tiny (postage-stamp sized) miniaturised 8-track
cassette -- but one drives and the interface were £80.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Microdrive

Stuff like expansion slots, disk controllers as a standard offering,
monitor and printer ports -- they were luxuries for rich people with
high-end micros.

> Out of curiosity, I later bought the Sinclair ZX-80, but coming from the
Apple, I thought the
> ZX-80 was horrid and not useable.

Compared to an Apple II, it probably was, to be fair.

> I later also tried the Timex Sinclair 1000.. better.. but still seemed
like a waste of time toy.

Slightly uprated version of the same machine, basically.

I guess the thing to try to imagine is that the ZX81 -- the basis of the
TS1000 -- was around a tenth of the price of the Apple II, and entirely
usable with a cassette recorder and a portable B&W TV.

In a country where people had say a quarter of the buying power of the USA,
*that* was an affordable machine. The Apple II wasn't.

The differential hasn't entirely gone, but nobody notices it or mentions it
now. Most don't know.

US petrol gasoline today: $2.80 per gallon. (£2 per 3.78 litres, or £0.52
per litre)
https://gasprices.aaa.com/

UK petrol today: £1.23 per litre.
http://www.petrolprices.com/

We pay 2.5 x more than you for petrol.

Much the same applies to many ordinary groceries -- bread, beer, clothing,
etc.

"Median household income in the U.S. rose to an estimated $59,055 in
January 2018"
https://seekingalpha.com/article/415-january-2018-median-household-income

"The Office for National Statistics Salary statistics show and average
earning of £26,500"
https://www.icalculator.info/news/UK_average_earnings_2014.html

US: £42,415 versus UK £26,500

That's why Sinclair did so well.

> Mind you, I had a monitor, and (2) disk drives on the Apple and had had
exposure to
> HP, DEC, and IBM minicomputers by the age of 16.

> Always with my nose into my own business, I'd no idea how fortunate I was
until reading
> of others' experiences here.

For comparison, I now live in Czechia. Still in the EU and not one of the
poorest.

The average cost of living here in the capital is about 1/3 of what it is
in London. In the 2nd city, Brno, where I used to live, it was about 1/4 of
London.

"Wages in Czech Republic increased to 31646 CZK/Month in the fourth quarter
of 2017"
https://tradingeconomics.com/czech-republic/wages

That's a little over £1,000 per month, £13,000 a year.

Or $1,500 per month, $18,000 a year.

The USA has it a *lot* better off than most Americans realise.

As my former flatmate put it, when I put an iPad in his hands: "this is the
first time I have ever touched an Apple product. Nobody I know has an Apple
computer, or ever had."

Here in Prague, iPhones are common and I see MacBooks everywhere -- but of
course the city is full of tourists. By local standard, Apple kit today is
nearly as unaffordably remote as an Apple II was to me in 1982 when I got
my ZX Spectrum, second hand for £80.


-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Geoff Oltmans via cctalk]

> On Apr 26, 2018, at 7:47 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk  
> wrote:
> 
> I know this is a rather USA-centric list, so probably most of you started
> off with things like the Apple II, the first sub-$1000 home computer. But
> in Britain and Europe back then, we were a lot poorer, and $1000 was an
> impossibly large amount of money -- many months of pay in a good job.
> 

I think you'd find a few people this side of the pond whose first computer was 
a Timex Sinclair 1000 (our equivalent of the ZX81). I know that was true in our 
household... My dad purchased one brand-new at Albertson's (a supermarket chain 
in the southeast US) for $100. We were enamored with it instantly despite its 
obvious drawbacks and that eventually led to the purchase of a more capable 
machine, the TI 99/4a. Unfortunately much to my dads chagrin that happening 
just a few months before its drastic price cut and eventual discontinuation. 

RIP. Definitely a very influential machine worldwide and an effort worth 
feeling proud of. 

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Adrian Graham via cctalk]

> On 26 Apr 2018, at 13:47, Liam Proven via cctalk  
> wrote:
> 
> I think if you ask virtually any British person in their late 30s, 40s or
> 50s, in anything connected with IT, what their first computer was, the
> answer would be a ZX 81 or a ZX Spectrum. It was the single range of
> machines that drove the entire computer revolution over here, and also in
> the form of a myriad clones in the Communist Bloc.

My first was a ZX80 which my Dad borrowed from my physics teacher at school. 
That spurred me on to get my own ZX81 which had just come out, then the 
Research Machines 380Z at later school, then the 48K ZXSpectrum. Amazing little 
machines for the money but I never discovered the name of the designer until 
much later.

> Later, imitators came along -- the Oric (6502) and Dragon (6809) ranges,
> for instance. And of course there were many machines that aspired to be
> better: Memotech. Camputers Lynx, Elan Enterprise, etc. All flopped to some
> degree.

You could’ve stopped after ‘flopped’ though the Oric went on to do very well in 
France and the Dragon still has a good userbase today. Strictly speaking they 
all do apart from the Lynx, but the Dragon is alive and well. The biggest 
Enterprise group is still in Hungary where the unsold machines were dumped 
after Enterprise Computers went bust in 1986.

> And that was down to Rick Dickinson, who only discovered years later how he
> had inspired whole generations of people.


Yep. RIP. I missed him doing ‘an evening with…’ last year at the Computer 
Museum in Cambridge, naturally I thought there’d be another one.

-- 
adrian/witchy
Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest home computer collection?
t: @binarydinosaursf: facebook.com/binarydinosaurs
w: www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[js--- via cctalk]

On 4/26/2018 11:46 AM, Liam Proven via 
cctalk wrote:

Personally, the $99 Timex 1000 was the only computer I could have afforded
back then.  Schools had Apple II's but not so many people in their homes
then, at least where I lived.

That's very cool. Thanks for sharing.

I knew the TS1000 (and TS1500?) did better in the USA than the TS2068 did,
but I didn't realise that they were that popular.

I was about 12 when they came out, and I have to confess, lacking colour or
sound or graphics, they were of little to no interest to me. It was the
later Spectrum that grabbed me.

But my uncle's ZX81 was the first computer I ever used that was owned by a
private individual. He was probably in his 60s when he got it, and he never
learned to operate it. I managed to enter a simple Lunar Lander game from
the manual, save it and get it running, which hugely impressed him -- he'd
failed repeatedly to get that far.

I suppose that was my first entry into the world of computing, in which I
still work...


Very interesting to see this perspective 
from the UK!


Located in the U.S. (Washington, D.C), I 
started with an Apple II+ in 1979 as a 
12 year old.
Out of curiosity, I later bought the 
Sinclair ZX-80, but coming from the 
Apple, I thought the

ZX-80 was horrid and not useable.

I later also tried the Timex Sinclair 
1000.. better.. but still seemed like a 
waste of time toy.


Mind you, I had a monitor, and (2) disk 
drives on the Apple and had had exposure to
HP, DEC, and IBM minicomputers by the 
age of 16.


Always with my nose into my own 
business, I'd no idea how fortunate I 
was until reading

of others' experiences here.

Thanks for sharing.

- John

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 17:55, Bill Degnan via cctalk 
wrote:

> There was a very large Timex 1000 / ZX81 user base in the US.  I have
quite
> a lot of newsletters and documents from these groups. I even did an
exhibit
> on the subject of SIGs for the Timex 1000 ZX81 at VCF MW a few years ago.
>You can see stacks of newsletters in stands flanking the machines and
> tapes.

> http://vintagecomputer.net/vcfmw-ECCC_2010/SinclairSIG/

> Personally, the $99 Timex 1000 was the only computer I could have afforded
> back then.  Schools had Apple II's but not so many people in their homes
> then, at least where I lived.

That's very cool. Thanks for sharing.

I knew the TS1000 (and TS1500?) did better in the USA than the TS2068 did,
but I didn't realise that they were that popular.

I was about 12 when they came out, and I have to confess, lacking colour or
sound or graphics, they were of little to no interest to me. It was the
later Spectrum that grabbed me.

But my uncle's ZX81 was the first computer I ever used that was owned by a
private individual. He was probably in his 60s when he got it, and he never
learned to operate it. I managed to enter a simple Lunar Lander game from
the manual, save it and get it running, which hugely impressed him -- he'd
failed repeatedly to get that far.

I suppose that was my first entry into the world of computing, in which I
still work...

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

RE: Restoring rubber keyboard on a logic analyzer

[Electronics Plus via cctalk]

Easier solution is to apply some conductive light lube. Radio Shack used to
carry it, and I repaired a LOT of remote controls with it!

Cindy

-Original Message-
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Peter
Coghlan via cctalk
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2018 4:17 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Restoring rubber keyboard on a logic analyzer


>
> I have a Philips logic analyzer (PM3585) which is about 20 years old at
this point.  It seems to be basically functional except for the keyboard,
which unfortunately is a critical part.
>
> This is one of those molded rubber type, with a circuit board behind the
rubber that has contact areas made of carbon film (at least they are black
in color) and on the back of each key a small cylindrical bump also coated
with carbon. Some of the buttons work but most don't seem to even if I press
hard.
>
> I've disassembled the keyboard, which was easy enough.  Inspection shows
no damage and no signs of corrosion or contamination.  I wiped everything
with isopropyl alcohol anyway.  The result is no change in behavior.
>
> Any suggestions for what to do next?
>

I had a similar problem with an old VCR remote control.  The problem seemed
to be that the bumps on the back of the keys lost their conductivity (and
cleaning them made them worse).

My solution was to glue pieces of aluminium foil to the back of the keys.
It was tedious but it seemed to sort it out.

Regards,
Peter Coghlan.

paul



---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Bill Degnan via cctalk]

There was a very large Timex 1000 / ZX81 user base in the US.  I have quite
a lot of newsletters and documents from these groups. I even did an exhibit
on the subject of SIGs for the Timex 1000 ZX81 at VCF MW a few years ago.
  You can see stacks of newsletters in stands flanking the machines and
tapes.

http://vintagecomputer.net/vcfmw-ECCC_2010/SinclairSIG/

Personally, the $99 Timex 1000 was the only computer I could have afforded
back then.  Schools had Apple II's but not so many people in their homes
then, at least where I lived.

Bill

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 10:55 AM, Zane Healy via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

>
> > On Apr 26, 2018, at 5:47 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk <
> cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> >
> > He not only did the ZX 80, ZX 81, ZX Spectrum and the QL, but also the
> Z88,
> > the Spectrum Next and others -- along with a lot of other stuff.
> >
> > I know this is a rather USA-centric list, so probably most of you started
> > off with things like the Apple II, the first sub-$1000 home computer. But
> > in Britain and Europe back then, we were a lot poorer, and $1000 was an
> > impossibly large amount of money -- many months of pay in a good job.
>
> My first computer was supposed to be a ZX81.  I worked all Summer painting
> the house to earn it.  As it happens, my payment was a VIC-20 with a tape
> recorder.  The ZX Spectrum has always fascinated me, and nearly 20 years
> ago, I traded a Tek cartridge with a list member for a ZX Spectrum 2+.  I
> still dream of having time to get that system up and running.  Even though
> I’ve never run it, it’s still one of my favorite pieces in my collection.
>
> Zane
>
>
>
>

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Zane Healy via cctalk]

> On Apr 26, 2018, at 5:47 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk  
> wrote:
> 
> He not only did the ZX 80, ZX 81, ZX Spectrum and the QL, but also the Z88,
> the Spectrum Next and others -- along with a lot of other stuff.
> 
> I know this is a rather USA-centric list, so probably most of you started
> off with things like the Apple II, the first sub-$1000 home computer. But
> in Britain and Europe back then, we were a lot poorer, and $1000 was an
> impossibly large amount of money -- many months of pay in a good job.

My first computer was supposed to be a ZX81.  I worked all Summer painting the 
house to earn it.  As it happens, my payment was a VIC-20 with a tape recorder. 
 The ZX Spectrum has always fascinated me, and nearly 20 years ago, I traded a 
Tek cartridge with a list member for a ZX Spectrum 2+.  I still dream of having 
time to get that system up and running.  Even though I’ve never run it, it’s 
still one of my favorite pieces in my collection.

Zane

Re: Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Alexandre Souza via cctalk]

Just to add some info to the excellent Liam's post, it was a revolution in
south america too. The first computers in Brazil were ZX80 clones (TK82C is
a ZX80 clone, not a ZX81...ZX81 were cloned just in the TK85 computer) and
it was a revolution! I was a very poor guy, my father was a Militar Police
soldier and he was able to afford (in 24 installments) a TK85 for me. It
was the only affordable computer for the poor for YEARS.

Another interesting thing is that the exterior designs of sinclair
computers were never completely copied in Brazil. TK82C had a case inspired
(but not directly cloned) from ZX80. TK83 was a complete innovative design.
TK85 was a clone of the externals of the ZX spectrum (being a ZX81 clone)
BUT had vents on top and the entire enclosure is taller. TK90X uses mostly
the same enclosure of the TK85 with the vents on diagonal, and TK95 cloned
the commodore Plus4 enclosure.

2018-04-26 9:47 GMT-03:00 Liam Proven via cctalk :

> A lengthy interview with the later great Rick Dickinson, product designer
> of basically every Sinclair computer, who sadly died of cancer on Tuesday.
>
> https://medium.com/@ghalfacree/an-interview-with-
> rick-dickinson-3fea60537338
>
> He not only did the ZX 80, ZX 81, ZX Spectrum and the QL, but also the Z88,
> the Spectrum Next and others -- along with a lot of other stuff.
>
> I know this is a rather USA-centric list, so probably most of you started
> off with things like the Apple II, the first sub-$1000 home computer. But
> in Britain and Europe back then, we were a lot poorer, and $1000 was an
> impossibly large amount of money -- many months of pay in a good job.
>
> I think in my early home-computer days, I never saw a single Apple II --
> they were exotic, expensive foreign machines. I have only seen them in
> recent years, as collectible antiques.
>
> In the UK, the revolution was the first sub-£100 home computer, the ZX 81.
>
> I first used a Commodore PET. Later, a few of my richer friends had
> Commodore 64s. The super-wealthy might have a BBC Micro. In either case, a
> working setup with mass storage -- floppy drives -- was nearing £1000.
> Nobody owned a _monitor_ -- they were exotica for professionals.
>
> Whereas a Spectrum with a Microdrive was a quarter of that and a highly
> usable system, with tens of thousands of games, plus mutiple programming
> languages, word processors, databases and more.
>
> I think if you ask virtually any British person in their late 30s, 40s or
> 50s, in anything connected with IT, what their first computer was, the
> answer would be a ZX 81 or a ZX Spectrum. It was the single range of
> machines that drove the entire computer revolution over here, and also in
> the form of a myriad clones in the Communist Bloc.
>
> Later, imitators came along -- the Oric (6502) and Dragon (6809) ranges,
> for instance. And of course there were many machines that aspired to be
> better: Memotech. Camputers Lynx, Elan Enterprise, etc. All flopped to some
> degree.
>
> The only thing that displaced Sinclair was Amstrad, who made more expensive
> computers but with much better specifications -- an integrated tape drive,
> or floppies, even a printer, and a real monitor. They cost more but still
> less than Commodore or Acorn: you got a lot for your money. Amstrad
> eventually bought Sinclair's models and name, and later still, it launched
> the first _cheap_ PC clones and kick-started the IBM-compatible industry
> over here. But it did it standing on Sinclair's shoulders.
>
> Part of the joy of Sinclair machines (like Apple and Commodore) was their
> very distinctive look -- black, slablike, with tiny discrete bits of
> colour, unlike the grey or beige boxes of virtually all the competition.
>
> And that was down to Rick Dickinson, who only discovered years later how he
> had inspired whole generations of people.
>
> --
> Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
> Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com
> Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
> UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
>

Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

A lengthy interview with the later great Rick Dickinson, product designer
of basically every Sinclair computer, who sadly died of cancer on Tuesday.

https://medium.com/@ghalfacree/an-interview-with-rick-dickinson-3fea60537338

He not only did the ZX 80, ZX 81, ZX Spectrum and the QL, but also the Z88,
the Spectrum Next and others -- along with a lot of other stuff.

I know this is a rather USA-centric list, so probably most of you started
off with things like the Apple II, the first sub-$1000 home computer. But
in Britain and Europe back then, we were a lot poorer, and $1000 was an
impossibly large amount of money -- many months of pay in a good job.

I think in my early home-computer days, I never saw a single Apple II --
they were exotic, expensive foreign machines. I have only seen them in
recent years, as collectible antiques.

In the UK, the revolution was the first sub-£100 home computer, the ZX 81.

I first used a Commodore PET. Later, a few of my richer friends had
Commodore 64s. The super-wealthy might have a BBC Micro. In either case, a
working setup with mass storage -- floppy drives -- was nearing £1000.
Nobody owned a _monitor_ -- they were exotica for professionals.

Whereas a Spectrum with a Microdrive was a quarter of that and a highly
usable system, with tens of thousands of games, plus mutiple programming
languages, word processors, databases and more.

I think if you ask virtually any British person in their late 30s, 40s or
50s, in anything connected with IT, what their first computer was, the
answer would be a ZX 81 or a ZX Spectrum. It was the single range of
machines that drove the entire computer revolution over here, and also in
the form of a myriad clones in the Communist Bloc.

Later, imitators came along -- the Oric (6502) and Dragon (6809) ranges,
for instance. And of course there were many machines that aspired to be
better: Memotech. Camputers Lynx, Elan Enterprise, etc. All flopped to some
degree.

The only thing that displaced Sinclair was Amstrad, who made more expensive
computers but with much better specifications -- an integrated tape drive,
or floppies, even a printer, and a real monitor. They cost more but still
less than Commodore or Acorn: you got a lot for your money. Amstrad
eventually bought Sinclair's models and name, and later still, it launched
the first _cheap_ PC clones and kick-started the IBM-compatible industry
over here. But it did it standing on Sinclair's shoulders.

Part of the joy of Sinclair machines (like Apple and Commodore) was their
very distinctive look -- black, slablike, with tiny discrete bits of
colour, unlike the grey or beige boxes of virtually all the competition.

And that was down to Rick Dickinson, who only discovered years later how he
had inspired whole generations of people.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Visiting Boston - Classic computer recommendations

[Huw Davies via cctalk]

I’m in Boston MA (technically Canton) for the next three weeks (April 29 to May 
19). Looking for recommendations on classic computer/classic car/sailing things 
of interest to do on the weekends.

Huw Davies   | e-mail: huw.dav...@kerberos.davies.net.au
Melbourne| "If soccer was meant to be played in the
Australia| air, the sky would be painted green"