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9-Dec-20 21:34

I found something on FleaBay. Something from around 1977. For the time it was impressively compact, yet still has graphics and bus slots for expansion. Just looknat the Altair, which is just a year older. And a hex keyboard to enter your programs. The first expansions I would suggest are Two cheap ICs (an OpAmp to connect a tape recorder as storage for your programs and a level shifter for RS232 to connect to a terminal) and a ROM for the drivers. Maybe also a tiny RAM expansion while you are at it.

This is a very early version, probably even the very first. It's just one step beyond the original DIY wire wrap version. The processor still has the original ceramic package (but not the graphics chip). If both were in white ceramic packages, the price might even be justified. White ceramic packages were reserved for RCA's preproduction series. However, it's the closest you can ever get to own a computer from the time when you could not yet buy them in stores and also not completely homegrown. I doubt that there are 1000 of them left in the entire world that still work. One of them would be mine and you would only get it over my undead body. Smile | :)

Look here![^]

Edit: Looking at the picture of the back side, I must say that the soldering looks amateurish. I would redo it completely. And that gash at the processor socket looks nasty.

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.

His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.

modified 10-Dec-20 3:45am.

Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter9-Dec-20 21:41

Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter

9-Dec-20 21:41

I do love the idea of computer, that is simple and easily hackable...
I'm actually writing an emulator to such imaginary computer, while wish to actually building it one day...
However I do not understand while such a computer should be built on actually old parts - it hints to me that such idea belongs to the past and became old and irrelevant, which in turn brings us to Q/A...

"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012

CodeWraith9-Dec-20 22:12

9-Dec-20 22:12

There are quite a few things on that board that have proven themsolves to be relevant until today. The processor (and everything else on the board) is CMOS, like all devices today. Back then this was seen as a dead end. It's also a RISC processor before RISC was officially even invented. An 8 bit RISC processor is a relatively unlikely thing, but they pulled that off.

It's the ancient version of the Raspberry PI, endlessly expandable and as much processor as you can get without pounds of logic chips and memory.

As to the emulators, there is one tiny problem. Real signals are anything but the perfect square signals of the data sheets. At higher frequencies the speed of light gets a little too slow and you may even need quantum mechanics to explain where your troubles may be coming from. Your emulated designs may only work theoretically. If that's enough for you, that's perfectly ok.

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.

His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.

Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter9-Dec-20 22:24

Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter

9-Dec-20 22:24

I do not state that the hardware - as is - irrelevant, I only say that there are hardware solutions, that also relevant and also gives you more power...
If it is the ancient Pi why not to use a Pi?

I'm painfully aware of the difference between emulator and real-life... One of the things holding me back is picking the right hardware (mainly looking at FPGA and ARM), meanwhile I make my emulator near to perfect Smile | :)

"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012

CodeWraith9-Dec-20 22:53

9-Dec-20 22:53

Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote:
If it is the ancient Pi why not to use a Pi?

For several reasons.

First: One of these was my Pi. It's a very old friend. I can concentrate on what I want to try out and do not get distracted by the hows and whys.

Then, it stands at the very beginning of the evolution, not somewhere further up the road. I must not follow the turns that have been taken and am free to explore alternatives.

And, while that may not apply to the Pi, state of the art hardware is sinfully expensive and I would need equipment at a cost which most of us would buy real estate for. Plus a few years worth of additional college education for a degree or two. That's a little out of reason, right?

Still, I am convinced that Moore's law will fail one day. Then our bosses will still want to sell something new and shiny. Under such conditions old ideas often are new again. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.

His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.

Greg Utas10-Dec-20 0:55

10-Dec-20 0:55

CodeWraith, translating from French, wrote:
The more things change, the more they remain the same.

This is also true of software, probably more so.

Centralized versus distributed. It's gone from mainframes, to workstations, to servers, to desktops, to the cloud. Sheer bollocks.

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The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

CodeWraith10-Dec-20 1:27

10-Dec-20 1:27

Yes, indeed. They always need something new that they can sell you, so why not hop back and forth?

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.

His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.

Greg Utas10-Dec-20 1:34

10-Dec-20 1:34

And each one is a vast improvement on the last!

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The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

CodeWraith10-Dec-20 2:46

10-Dec-20 2:46

That depends on what you want to do. For my part, I'm very content with having lots of power and minimal network(s). Actually, I need the internet mostly to bug you guys here.

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.

His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.

Greg Utas10-Dec-20 2:54

10-Dec-20 2:54

I left out the /sarc.

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The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

CodeWraith10-Dec-20 3:01

10-Dec-20 3:01

In that calse I can reveal that I actually live very well with the good old VT100 at 9800 or 19200 bits/sec.

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.

His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.

Greg Utas10-Dec-20 3:24

10-Dec-20 3:24

Brings back memories! My university years were spent on a PDP-10, which I still remember fondly. When the VT100s (or maybe one of their predecessors) arrived, it was like a new world opened up. Then the DECWriters only had to be used to get hard copies.

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The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

CodeWraith10-Dec-20 3:32

10-Dec-20 3:32

The Zwölf, my modernized version of the old Elf on Ebay is still stuck with a serial terminal. It does not even have a serial port. It does RS232 in software on two bit banged general I/O pins like a microcontroller. 19.2 kbit/sec is not so bad for that. Of course I have no real VT100. Terminal emulation on an elderly PC will have to do.

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.

His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.

Greg Utas10-Dec-20 4:14

10-Dec-20 4:14

I remember looking at an earlier post of yours and being quite impressed with its character display, which was what, 3x5?

I'm thankful to have much more memory than in the past. Having to go to disk destroys performance to the point where some things can't be done. But now, processors are so much faster that people write crap that would have been a non-starter 20 years ago.

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The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

CodeWraith10-Dec-20 6:57

10-Dec-20 6:57

Greg Utas wrote:
I remember looking at an earlier post of yours and being quite impressed with its character display, which was what, 3x5?

Take another look here[^]. It's in the gallery, along with many others.

Greg Utas wrote:
I'm thankful to have much more memory than in the past. Having to go to disk destroys performance to the point where some things can't be done. But now, processors are so much faster that people write crap that would have been a non-starter 20 years ago.

How about 16 mb on the little Elf? Would that be enough? If not, I can extend that to almost any size by making the page registers a bit wider. Paged memory is nothing new, but the processor allows me to do the page switching in the calling procedure. The processor does not notice anything and the settings of the page registers end up on the stack, along with the return address. I can call routines anywhere at any time without knots. The only difference now is that I must use 24 bit addresses instead of 16 bit addresses. Why did nobody ever think of that in all these years?

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.

His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.

Greg Utas10-Dec-20 9:02

10-Dec-20 9:02

The product I worked on for many years had 16MB and 24-bit addressing, which was adequate for a long time. But my C++ static analysis tool uses far more (over 300MB for a decent sized code base), so it would have to go to disk, and the compiler would have to do page switching before procedure calls.

16MB on an Elf! No hobbyist could have afforded that much memory back then and would probably have looked at you like you were from Mars if you said that it would happen one day. Laugh | :laugh:

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The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

CodeWraith10-Dec-20 9:24