To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 03:23:12 -0800 Subject: Re: Early gaming [was: FDISK] Message-ID: <20001104.033042.-4103817.2.domanspc@juno.com> X-Mailer: Juno 4.0.11 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Juno-Line-Breaks: 0-2,4-8,10-16,18-22,24-25,27-29,31,34,36-37,39,41,43,45-46,48,50,52,54,56,58-59,61-63,65-68,70-84 X-Juno-Att: 0 X-Juno-RefParts: 0 From: Robert W Moss Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Sorry Bob, Check Pats answer. We were talking about the MITS Altair 8800, I8080 based microcomputer. It was sold in kit form, (a case, some led's, some resistors, some switches, some chips, some boards and a schematic). You had to build it yourself, after you got the parts from MITS, who were up to six months behind in orders in the first 30 days. To get # 3, Steve Dompier went to Albuquerque, NM after three months waiting and badgered them into giving him part of the kit parts and then went home and spent 3 months waiting for several more baggies of parts which he assembled as the stuff came in. He even had to write his own little diagnostic programs to check out his system and make sure it worked right and when he got his memory boards they didn't work right. Being a hardware hacker he eventually got it working and while he was doing some testing near his radio he heard the radio making noises, (in electronics we would call it noise or static from oscillations of the computer Hf circuits being to close to the radio circuits.), which he thought sounding like some musical notes. He experimented and eventually he was able to calcuate the exact sequence of actions to use in the computer to map each sound on a several octave wide musical scale. Then he wrote a listing needed to play the song "Fool on The Hill" and a several seconds delay and then play "Daisy". He had no storage devices or paper tape input device, so he had to enter the 2000+ lines of code by hand, each time he wanted to play them, using the 24 switches on the front Panel of the system box. The nite he went to show off his neat hack to his friends at the 4th meeting of the Home Brew Computer Club , there was not even a place to plug in the computer and his radio in the meeting room and he had to run a power cord from another room and then the cord was short, so he had to put it out in the hall by the door. After he had keyed in about 2/3 of the code, some boys running around the halls ran into his power cord and pulled it out so he had to re-input the code again. He finally got it done and started to run the program and after it was done with "Fool on The Hill" everyone started to cheer. Then it started to play "Daisy" and when that was finished it sort of brought the house down. The blinking lights were there (36 Led's) but they were really only good for reading octal output code. A lot of computers used the Led's even back in the 50's. They were neat to look at but if you really were limmited in using them for output. At MIT they used speakers to play music on million dollar computers that only had 4 Led's. The Altair had 36 Led's in two rows and 24 switches in 2 rows for input. You had to make your own peripheral boards if you wanted them because MITS was way behind in getting anything done (about 6 months for a board that might not even work, and came in kit form). Anyway that is considered by many people to be the real beginning of the Computer Age. Cheap, Accesible, Small, Programable PC's for the masses. BOB 'DOMAN' MOSS "Chocolate is a vitamin" On Sat, 4 Nov 2000 00:27:55 -0500 "Bob Jonkman" writes: > WAG: I remember a program called "Kill The Bit". It was loaded in > by keying in all the instructions from the front-panel switches, and > > the game consisted of a single LED lit sequentially along the data > register lights (think of a movie marquee with only one bulb lit at > a > time). You won the game by flicking a data switch under the lit > LED. > The score, obviously, was either 0 or 1... > > It was harder than it sounded. Even at a measly 1 MHz, that LED > could MOVE! > ________________________________________________________________ YOU'RE PAYING TOO MUCH FOR THE INTERNET! Juno now offers FREE Internet Access! Try it today - there's no risk! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj.