Does anyone remember these
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... or even have one? Exatron Stringy Floppy - Wikipedia[^] Back in 1978 a floppy controller plus drive was far beyond my budget. Stuck with a ordinary tape recorder (I still have it and use it to load the old tapes), this appeared to be a compromise, but turned out to be a dead end.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.Never had one of those but do remember, in about 1981 or so being given a sample "hobbit drive" which was a small digital cassette drive with a view to possibly using it in a project. It had a hinged door like a hi-fi style cassette unit, but took tapes about as small as the ones that fit in pocket dictaphones. Never did get around to evaluating it. EDIT - found some details. The company I was then working at sold a machine which was based on the Nascom so that would fit. Link to hobbit drive info
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... or even have one? Exatron Stringy Floppy - Wikipedia[^] Back in 1978 a floppy controller plus drive was far beyond my budget. Stuck with a ordinary tape recorder (I still have it and use it to load the old tapes), this appeared to be a compromise, but turned out to be a dead end.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.I remember the Exatron drive, but never had one. Like several on the list, my history started with Atari 800 and a 410 recorder; migrated to 810 then 1050 disk drives (remember 88K/floppy?). After the N key quit on my 800, I got an Atari 1200, a design I still think was one of the most elegant ever. Then bought an Amiga 1000 because, as one person wrote, it was designed by the Atari guys (Jay Miner et al): nice machine that never lived up to its potential through extreme corporate mismanagement. Eventually, I was reluctantly dragged into the Microsoft Windows world when I bought a DEC PC (having used PDP-11's at college and my first job). Bought a Gateway and a Dell along the way, too. Finally, made the escape to Apple about 2010. For those who want to relive that past, there are some excellent emulators with a lot of the old software out there. I am getting great joy out of Atari800MacX with a couple of USB Atari-style joysticks these days. Today's games using fancy controllers with more than one joystick and a button are too complicated for me!
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All you young whipper-snappers have life easy. When I started out on a DEC PDP-11, I had to store my files on paper tape, and feed then in through a teletype which printed them out as it loaded, one character at a time.
Cheers, Mick ------------------------------------------------ It doesn't matter how often or hard you fall on your arse, eventually you'll roll over and land on your feet.
There you go, same here PDP-11, but I had the 512k color graphics option, that option was so expensive it was not even funny. Wrote my first CAD/CAM on that machine.
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God, no! Nobody used ferrite core memories anymore even then. Typical were around 300 to 400 ns for SRAMs, like the Intel 2102 (1 kilobit!)
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.The 2102 was the first memory chip I used. My first homebrew box used 8 of them. 1k of memory and it drew almost 2 amps from the 5 volt supply. Later upgraded to the low power versions and that allowed me to have 8 kbytes using the same PSU. Whoopee!
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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Compared to paper tape 16KB was impressive and 1 minute extremely fast. Paper tape readers were manually seek (find label written on tape) and pull it through as fast as you can. If you were rich and had an ASR33 teletype with mechanical paper tape the transfer rate was a breathtaking 10 bytes per second.
ASR33 was probably the noisiest device used for printing.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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CDP1802 wrote:
until Commodore kicked the can
Amiga was a sad case of incompetent marketing dumping the excellent work of engineers - originated from Atari or Commodore...
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
I still have my Amiga 500 complete with its 40MB hard drive and memory expander (bringing it up to an astounding 1 MByte). I wrote my first PC programs on this box using Lattice C and a translator. That was in the days when windows was scarce and DOS was king. The most memorable thing about the A500 was the ridiculously heavy mouse. Well I remember the arguments betweem Atari and Amiga fans. Bottom line is they have both faded into the dim and distant past.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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The 2102 was the first memory chip I used. My first homebrew box used 8 of them. 1k of memory and it drew almost 2 amps from the 5 volt supply. Later upgraded to the low power versions and that allowed me to have 8 kbytes using the same PSU. Whoopee!
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
I still have my first computer. It also uses the 32 of the 2102 for whopping 4k RAM. It is completely CMOS, so power consumption was not much of an isue. The LED displays draw more power than the rest of the computer.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns. -
... or even have one? Exatron Stringy Floppy - Wikipedia[^] Back in 1978 a floppy controller plus drive was far beyond my budget. Stuck with a ordinary tape recorder (I still have it and use it to load the old tapes), this appeared to be a compromise, but turned out to be a dead end.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.Oh yes I remember them. Back in the 80's I even got qualified to repair them :). Usually the belt fell off or the magnetic head that read the tape got dirty. Oh well, I seem to be fond of getting skilled in backwater technology. Anyone want a low level back-end programmer with optimized C programming skills? :(
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... or even have one? Exatron Stringy Floppy - Wikipedia[^] Back in 1978 a floppy controller plus drive was far beyond my budget. Stuck with a ordinary tape recorder (I still have it and use it to load the old tapes), this appeared to be a compromise, but turned out to be a dead end.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns. -
I have a core dump sitting on my desk. A physical one. Taken from an old PDP. If my count is right, it is 1152 bits large. It is a pity that I don't have the facility to read its contents.
If the data has not degraded and been corrupted, but then again that kind of little miracle does happen.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
