diy solar

diy solar

I can't even express the right words....

Did you ever play Wumpus? It was a BASIC game you could type in from a book. I really miss those early days.
I don’t remember Wumpus, but I did type in text adventure games from a magazine. Don’t remember the main character, but I do remember typing in at least three of his games.

I remember going back to Zork. Would have been a re-release arounf 1987. Can’t remember the system. Perhaps an Amiga between 1990 and 1993?
 
"More BASIC Computer Games" by David H Ahl:


Wumpus I & II are the last two in the book. There was even a version specific to the TRS-80:


"Creative Computing" magazine was like porn back then.
 
I played Space Warp a lot on the TRS-80 Model III we had in our high school lab. Loaded the game via cassette player. Fun times.
 
You probably mean assembly language. Very few people ever actually coded in machine language.
On my first job out of college I'd watch in amazement as the fortran compiler guy would step through a program in memory, looking at the 16 register lights, and recite what the fortran source code was. What a weirdo, I thought. About 20 years later when I was working on a C compiler code generator it hit me that I was doing the very same thing. And now when my worn out brain couldn't begin to do something like that, I think it was pretty weird. I'm often in awe what the young hackers can do with the current tools.
 
I was REALLY cheap at first. Got a junk BAUDOT teletype, looked like a mail box.
Dial-up 110 baud with dot-matrix printer.
Then I was a spendthrift and got a CompuPro 8085/8088 S-100 system with dual 8" floppies. Nothing today boots that fast, including my Lenovo at work or Dell Precision with SSD at home. "Click-Click" in 1/2 second and it was up. Qume and Diablo daisy wheels - much better fonts than early LaserJet.

First job out of college, I was writing (self-test) microcode at HP for their new CISC machine of the 3000 series. Then implementing parts of RISC at transistor, leaf cell, programmable logic array level.

Now I talk to instruments with MatLab on Windows, and can't get decent rate of multiple transactions. It can be done, instruments on the bench have that inside, I just don't know how. So much standing between me and the transistors. But with some drivers and interfaces, can transfer big files of captured data efficiently.

Just got my new "Bulk Current Injection" EMI test system in at work, will set that up when have time.
 
I had to use an actual debugger today. A user sent a file with something goofy in the data. Mark I eyeball couldn't spot it, but once I stepped through the code in the debugger the problem was obvious. I really hate codepage issues.

I deal mostly with very large databases. Not quite big enough to need Hadoop, but big enough that putting it in the cloud would be quite expensive.
 
I did that one semester in college as well. Nothing sadder than seeing someone who had dropped their stack of cards and had to spend hours trying to get them back in the right order because they hadn't taken the time to number them.

OK, one thing is sadder - dropping your ice cream cone on the ground after one lick.
Yep, that was a sad situation when you dropped those cards or even had one of them out of order.
One hilarious aspect of those old IBM systems was when someone would type in the wrong code in Fortran and use a page eject command in a loop. They had massive printers that were on the outside of the Lab, and all of a sudden you would hear screaming from the senior Lab techs as a thousand pages of those green and white dot matrix pages ejected about four feet up into the air :ROFLMAO: .

My first personal computer was also a TRS-80 while I dreamed about owning an Apple II. Then I bought a Sinclair Z81 and finally got a Vic 20 which was soon followed by my all time inspirational computer the Commodore 64.
I was in Philadelphia at the time and that was good because I must have had about 4 of those C64 burn out on me in the first year. I remember back then you could drive up to their factory or warehouse and you would see a line of people with C64 in their hands. They pretty much just took your old one and replaced it with no questions asked.
 
You sure about that? 1GB in the 80's would be a drum disk about the size of a washing machine.
Perhaps you meant 1MB.
I worked with PDP 11/70's in the 80's. The RM05 drive was 256mb and held a platter stack that went into a top loading "washing machine". If I was running a data intensive app the cabinet would shake like it a washer on spin cycle :)
 
My first on-line (BBS) experience was with a glass teletype with a 300 baud acoustic modem you had to manually dial the BBS number then insert the handset into the couple cups. The one I had, used an 80 character x 25 line display. This one prints on paper!


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I ran a BBS in the early 80's and thought I was hot crap when I got a USR HST Courier 9600 BPS modem at a special deal for sysops ($699). Regular price was $999. I still have that modem lol. You could link at 19,200 with another HST. Ahh....good old Procomm
 
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