Even Older Man Yells At Whippersnappers

[justin walters]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 7:29 AM, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 5:09 AM, Gregory Ewing
> <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> >
> > Never mind that fake assembly rubbish, learn a real assembly
> > language! And hand-assemble it and toggle it into the front
> > panel switches like I did!
>
> 1979, I was working at Bausch and Lomb in Rochester NY. We had a 16
> bit Data General Nova 'Minicomputer'. It had 4 registers, called
> accumulators. It had 16 front panel toggle switches, one for each bit,
> one that said 'deposit', and one that said run. It had a dial with
> stops for AC0, AC1, AC2, AC3 (for the 4 accumulators), PC (program
> counter), address and contents.
>
> When you powered up the machine it did not boot. You had to hand enter
> a short bootstrap program in binary. Do to this you had to turn the
> dial to address, key in a 16 bit address, click deposit, turn the dial
> to contents, key in a 16 bit line of assembly code, click deposit, and
> repeat this for each line of code (there were like 5 or 6). Then key
> in the address of where you wanted to run from turn the dial to PC,
> deposit, and click run. Any mistake and it would not boot. Often took
> 3 or 4 tries.
>
> After a few weeks of this I was sick of it. I had the boot code burned
> into an EEPROM (which I had to send out to be programmed). Then I
> build a very small wire wrapped board with the EEPROM and an
> oscillator and few TTL chips. I tapped into the 5V power on the CPU
> board and used the leading edge of that to trigger a one shot which
> 'woke up' my circuit, and caused it to clock out the code from the
> EEPROM and load it to the appropriate place, set the program counter
> and start the program. I drilled holes in the CPU board and mounted
> this with little plastic standoffs.
>
> I did this all on my own, coming in on the weekends, without company
> approval, and when it was working I showed my boss. He was blown away
> and he was sure we could patent this and sell it. He had me formalize
> the design, write it up, have an actual PCB made, go to the company
> lawyers, the whole 9 yards. Then Data General announced the new
> version of the Nova .... with auto boot.
> --
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>


That's crazy!

The oldest computer I ever owned was a 1984 Tandy 1000. I actually still
miss that thing.

It had an option where you could change the 8-bit music that played on
startup.

Luckily for me, it took 5.25" floppys.