On Sun, 19 Apr 2009, Richard Polivka, N6NKO wrote:
Altair 8080. Having to write the bootstrap loader in 32 bytes (may be wrong on that length) to set the serial port, initialize the disk controller and where to start loading the bios, that had to be hacked on for your system. Of course both had to fit in one track on a 8" floppy.
I started out w/o hard drives, w/o floppies, w/o tape drives. Programs disappeared if you shut off the computer. Input was 8 toggle switches (one byte wide) and a pushbutton, plus a few mode switches. Put it in load mode, start flipping toggles in binary and then push the pushbutton. Make a mistake, start over. The entire memory was 256 bytes. Output was two LED hexadecimal displays. I still have it somewhere. I should frame it. Or let my kids try it. -- Curt, WE7U. archer at eskimo dot com http://www.eskimo.com/~archer Lotto: A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown Windows: Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U. The world DOES revolve around me: I picked the coordinate system!" _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir
