Bloody rubbish

[Gene Heskett]

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.)
>
> Skip

That brings back memories. I was the ACE at KRCR in Redding CA, and I saw 
a huge quality destroying bottleneck in producing our own commercials 
and proposed to the GM that I wanted to learn something about computers, 
and I thought it would be a way around it, by having it installi the cue 
tones that made an autmatic station break sequencer work, as opposed to 
copying a blank tape from a poor master, then dub copying the finished 
commercial to the bad copy.

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.

Then I eventually went down the road in search of taller grass. I left 
instructions as to how to patch it for for the ballistics of newer tape 
machines and forgot about it, eventually landing for good in WV as the 
CE at a CBS affiliate in '84.  In '94, I took my then fairly new wife 
who has now passed on from COPD, to meet an aunt of mine, in her 80's as 
I figured I was running out of time to do that, so we booked a flight to 
Portland and she would meet us there and take us to her place in Salem. 
While there, I called that tv station and found out they were still 
using my gismo. 16+ years in a tv stations control room is unheard of 
but they said it was working fine and was one heck of a labor saver.  
With memory of only 4k, I used a lot of self-modifying code, but was 
very carefull to re-init it at the top of the loop. It didn't crash, 
ever. I shanghied an old cart deck that was off speed for power failure 
recovery storage since the thing had only a 256 byte boot eprom.  When I 
left I took a cart with 3 copy's on it, and a paper copy of the hex 
codes and assembly nemonics if it ever grew an assembler, which it 
didn't. I can reach it by standing up to reach the shelf it is on above 
me.

And if I had to fix it today, I could "get my head" back into "my head" 
easier than I can make python work when it doesn't. I'm lurking here, 
trying to learn about python, but TBT, most of you are talking above my 
pay grade.  Way too afraid you are doing some students homework rather 
than dropping into teacher mode, a fault of this list.

Take care and stay well, all of you.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>