A2000A/A2000B
Bart, pisano! You have an ELFII? You know what this means? We can ask CIS to
start up an 1802 forum for us. Actually mine is packed in a box but I have kept
all the parts through moves to and from Germany over the years and have meant
to reassemble it someday. Maybe I will do it now.
I only got mine to 48K mem but I did install Fig Forth and worked hard
integrating Steve Nies's text editor with the OS favored by ACE, the Amateur
Computer Experimenter group based in Ontario. If you knew their newsletter Ipso
Facto, you probably saw my name on some of the articles. A few reviews to the
Pet User's Group newsletter also. Those were fun times, weren't they?
I still have my MC6847 video board in the box, 100% homemade of course. Like
you I never got a Harddrive or even a floppy interfaced to it. for years it
used a keyin loader to boot in the hand-pulled paper tape monitor which then
booted in the cassette O/S including the editor and Forth. When I packed it she
was using a 2716 Eprom to boot up the cassette. I used a GE Terminet 300 for my
ascii printer at that time.
I agree of course that IBM would have done the world a favor by opting for a
CMOS based MPU with 16 (count 'em) 16 bit (!!) registers, and the incredibly
fast register pointers to instantly switch programs with a single cycle after
an interrupt, and all the other advantages. With computers that ran from a
small battery right back there in 1978, what would the PC look like today? wear
iot in you eyeglass frames probably. Instead they opted for Nmos and
powersupplys that could do double duty as arc-welders and a fixed register
based/seperate I/O bus architecture rooted in ancient mainframe theory. The
4040 was actually a japanese customer inspired attempt by Intel to pack a
primative DEC mini into a couple of chips, I am told. Too bad they didn't also
look at the PDP architecture and instruction set, which was great. I was also
dismayed when IBM made that stupid choice and followed up on it by adopting Dos
instead of multitasking CP/M. Still makes me burn.
No, the ACE projects appeared in PE many months after they presented the first
project to build the Altair 8800 in Jan 1975. It was designed by MITS of
Albuquerque NM, Intel 80f80 2mhz based, had 256 bytes of main memory, and used
toggle switches to program it, leds for output. That's it. (later I read that
the designers showed the editor of PE a singular prototype which they knew
didn't work yet to get free advertising. For their failing company it was a
last ditch effort to survive. When the orders for the $397kit/$498 assembled
Altair flooded in tfhey had to rush to hire engineers and get it working. Sound
like any other intel based machines we know?)
I'm not positive but I believe SWTP in Texas had already introduced their 6800
based machine (to increase sales of their ascii television based terminal IMHO)
before Netronics introduced the ELF single board project in or near 1978.
I still have some software for the 1802 like PaloAlto Basic (Oak Ridge
Version), Pilot, Assembler, full screen Text Editor, Fig Forth, 1802
disassembler, DDT full
screen dynamic debugger, …all the foregoing for 40×16
video screen….plus for 1861 output I have Netronics original monitor ElfBug,
CSTP debug/trace, Super Graphics, Morsecode decoder, Life, Space war, a
lightpen pgm and more. Gotta go.
Tom
alternate: jonest@amigat.com
I never met a man I didn't like…Will Rogers