Re: Moving from 8051 to AVR

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 08:29:23 PST, mojaveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Everett
M. Greene) wrote:

Jonathan Kirwan <jkirwan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
<david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ian Bell wrote:
David Brown wrote:

I remember the joys of hand-assembling. My old spectrum had an
unreliable tape recorder, so a lot of my (admittedly rather short)
assembly programs were written out on paper, hand-assembled, then
entered using a small basic loader program. If I made a mistake, it was
out with the power cord, and start typing again from scratch. I guess
it taught me a lot about safe programming! The typing was a lot easier
after I'd replaced the chewing gum keyboard with the keyboard from a
broken TI-99/4A.

You had a keyboard??? You were so lucky. The first computer I programmed had
a row of switches on the front panel that you used to enter code one word
at a time. Took ages.

When I were a lad, we had to wind our Turing machine tapes by hand...

Seriously, I think you started a little earlier than me (I'd guess you
are a bit older?). The first computer I ever saw was a Commodore Pet,
when I was about 7, and it had a keyboard. That's when I decided I
wanted to be a programmer when I grew up.

I still remember the front panels fondly and wish they existed for the
80x86 PCs. It would be wonderful to have access to all the registers,
MSRs, MTRRs, re-order buffer, etc., via a front panel!

It was a transition for me to go from a MITS Altair 8800 front panel
with metal bat-handle switches (which gave you callouses, after a
time) to the IMSAI's flat plastic switches (which I still have a box
of, for both colors, and don't think are even made anymore, today.)
Keyboards weren't all that readily accessible to hobbyists, at the
time. I remember saving them as spares from larger equipment and
adapting them with custom logic to my needs. I would not infrequently
wind up entering ASCII via a front panel.

I grew up with what could be called mid-size mainframes
and often miss the banks of register/switches with which
various things could be monitored/altered. The hardware
stop and single-stepping of instructions had its uses.

I never had the pleasure of entering programs via toggle
switches but I did go through the joys of audio tapes
for the Apple II.

Of course, I had that pleasure, too. As well as tapes for the IBM PC.
Radioshack had a tape player with the right controls for starting and
stopping under software control and it worked okay, and cheaper. I
used paper tape a lot, earlier than this, and had purchased a simple
reader head (no motor) where I could simply pull the tape through. It
could observe the tinier sprocket holes, so I could time the reading
of the other holes in my software driver (which I wrote and toggled in
through the front panel.)

I would have been in my 20's when the PET came out. It was
way too expensive for me to consider owning, at the time.

I had my eye on the PDP8i and thinking that if the price
ever got below $10K, I might buy one. MITS and the others
came along in time to preclude my doing that.

Since you bring up the 8i, I also used DECTape, back then. Still have
spools of it in a box, somewhere. I worked on PDP-8's (e, I think)
and PDP-11's (those with front panels, like the /45) and would have
very much drooled at the idea of having either for my own. But you
must have been richer than I, to have even considered the idea of
owning one at a price like that. It was a struggle and a half for me
to actually buy the unassembled parts for the Altair 8800, without a
power supply or anything else to go with it. Even the 256 bytes of
static RAM it came with couldn't be upgraded on my budget, despite the
fact that there were three unfilled sockets just sitting there waiting
for three more 256 byte chips. It took me almost a year to pull
together enough cash to buy two 4k dynamic RAM cards, after that.

My salary at the time was about $525/mo. and I was paying my own way
on everything. When I got an increase to $552/mo, midway through the
year, it made a huge difference to me, too.

Jon
.

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