Whipped Cream Difficulties

Just be patient, it will all come together in the end.

A few weeks ago, one of my cow orkers sent around this photo, just for fun. It prompted a discussion among some of my other cow orkers about their first computers. I was sitting there listening to these guys talking about their 386 machines with 4 MB of memory, and thinking to myself, “You bunch of pikers. My first computer had 4K of memory. Not 4 MB, 4 KB. As in, 4,096 bytes total. And I used cassette tape for mass storage.” You tell that to kids nowdays, they just don’t believe you. (Well, except maybe the cow orker who sent around that photo; I suspect he actually got his start sometime in the System 360 days.)

So how were your holidays? Mine were pretty good; I got a pile of new books, including:

• Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss
• The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist

(Once I finish these, they’re going on the shelf right next to my copy of Half Mile Down. Which is a story for another post.)

• Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science
• Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing
• Double Eagle: The Epic Story of the World’s Most Valuable Coin. I believe I mentioned this book in a previous post , and I’m glad to have a copy in my hot little hands. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve glanced through it, and I’m very excited.
• K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America’s Most Unlikely Tourist. This is another book I’m very excited about; Carlson was one of my favorite WP writers before he took the buyout, so the idea of reading a book-length work of history by a guy who seems to share my odd sense of humor fills me with joy.

I think that covers it (there were a few other items, including a badly needed floor lamp). My thanks to everyone for their gifts. And a special thanks to everyone who used my Amazon link to buy stuff; I don’t want it to sound like I made money hand over fist off folks, but between Amazon and Google AdSense, this blog is very close to breaking even. Considering that I’m doing this just for fun, and to keep from filling other people’s mailboxes, being able to break even, or even come out ahead on this project, makes my heart leap with joy. (Also, thanks to Instapundit, The High Road, and a few other folks for linking to my NERF post.)

(I hate to seem like I’m bragging; but since I mention one particular present below, I’d feel bad if I didn’t at least acknowledge the others.)

So, anyway. Point. Yes, there is one, believe it or not. Work let us go early yesterday, so I had a chance to swing by the Post Office (also the subject of another future post), and found a big armful of packages for my post office box. Those packages included some of the stuff above, a new Dremel tool (ordered as part of the after Christmas sale at Amazon; speaking of Dremel tools, can anyone recommend a good introductory guidebook or DVD?), and a mysterious package from my younger brother. After I opened it from the correct end (he had written all over it “Open here!”, “NO! Open other end!”) the first thing I found was a card:

Enclosed please find something everyone wanted for Christmas (in 1982) – :-)!

Digging deeper into the package, I found this:

And going in even deeper:

Does this look familiar to anyone? Yes. An original Radio Shack TRS-80 Pocket Computer, the netbook before there were netbooks. (Arguably, also before there was a Net, but not really.) A whopping 1.9 K (or “1,424 steps” as the docs put it) of RAM, and 11 KB of ROM (7 KB for the BASIC interpreter, and 4 KB for the monitor).  Two 4-bit CPUs running at 256 KHz (yes, kilohertz) working in parallel (but not really; if I understand the architecture correctly, the two CPUs switched back and forth while running programs). A one-line 24 character LCD display. And, yes, cassette tapes for mass storage. How cool is this? It brings back memories…midnight, not a sound from the pavement…sorry.

So does this have any practical use, or is it just a fun exercise in retrocomputing? Well, first of all, what’s wrong with a little retrocomputing? Secondly, poking around some, I found the Sky and Telescope software archive. It looks like it shouldn’t take too much effort to port the phase of the moon and sunrise/sunset programs to the Pocket Computer. (It will take some; from what I can tell, the PC-1 only supports single character variable names, while Sky and Telescope uses two or more character names. Also, I’m still reviewing the manuals, trying to get an understanding of how “Pocket BASIC” differs from the BASICs of old, and how the PC-1 stores programs. My hope is to be able to fit both programs into the PC-1, and maybe even come up with a spiffy ASCII graphic display for moon phase.)

I’m somewhat humbled to think that we went to the moon with computers that were (arguably) less powerful than this one. (At least, on board Apollo. The System/360 guys on the ground at NASA had it easy.)

(I’m also wondering if there was any way to program the PC-1 in assembly. If there are PEEK and POKE commands in the BASIC, I can’t find them in the manual. And I wonder what the ASCII character set is like; I know that it is all UPPER CASE, but I wonder what ASC(128) and higher look like? Hmmm. Time to end this post and hack up a BASIC program.)

So, thanks to my brother, who shall remain nameless here, but who is welcome to comment. Perhaps he’ll even divulge where he ran across this particular piece of retro hardware.

(I may have to start digging other retro hardware out of the closet and doing a weekly feature. Sort of like Tam’s Sunday Smith, but more boring.)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Books, CompScI, Geek, netbook, Retrocomputing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.