On Sep 8 2015 8:24 AM, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Tuesday 08 September 2015 08:49:57 andy pugh wrote: > >> On 8 September 2015 at 13:43, Kenneth Lerman <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> > (Written by a man who owned a computer with 16K of memory -- >> > although he expanded it to 48K.) >> >> My first computer had 1k of memory. > > Gotcha beat Andy, my first one, a Cosmac Elf, had 256 bytes. RCA 1802 > MPU. A "different" architecture, but one that could be quite miserly > with its memory usage. I learned how to program it using its monitor > and a hex keypad, then added a 4k static ram board plugged into an > s-100 > buss backplane ($400+ dollars back then) and, laying ground for my > machine control efforts now, made it into a machine controller for > U-Matic vcr's...
Wow, that is a trip down amnesia lane... My first paid gig was programming an RCA 1802 that was developed for a geothermal test well data logger. I remember being able to do multi-thread programming in hardware (via 4 banks of registers, and the context switch was an atomic operation). The guy that hired me was the engineer, and the prime contractor was to cheep to spend the bucks for an assembler (many thousands of $$$), so we had to code it in hex... I kid you not. 5 or six years later (when I got more programming under my belt) I bet a friend that I could write a fully relocatable macro assembler for it in 24 hours. Well, it took me 36 hours, but years later in 1999 when he had to do some Y2K maintenance he dusted my old assembler code off, compiled it (with only a few non-ANSI warnings), made the changes, and was done by the end of the day. He bought me a second case of coke (the original bet was a case of coke). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
