- eMachines also had the bad luck of going IPO at the worst time possible. NASDAQ hit its all time intraday high of 5,132.52 on Mar 10, 2000. It dipped about 300 points for about 1-2 weeks, before eMachines went IPO on Fri, Mar 24. NASDAQ hit an intraday high of 5,078.86 that day, then went into a free fall from that peak. That was the beginning of the "dot com crash". It would take 15 years for NASDAQ to recover (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/apr/23/nasdaq-new-...).
eMachines IPO'd at $9 on Mar 24, climbing to $10, then closing at 8 13/16. It would never again hit $9. It was delisted from NASDAQ slightly over a year later, in May 2001. I cannot find a source for the exact date of delisting. Wikipedia says that the price was hovering around $0.38 when it was delisted, but I think I recall seeing its price hitting lows of $0.12 before delisting.
- I cannot recall seeing the word "cyberdeck" until 2 days ago, on this site. Now there are 2 articles on the front page with this term. The keyword tag has been used only in the last 2 days: https://twostopbits.com/tag?q=cyberdeck
Did I miss some event in the world that made this word popular? I understand it's a word from Neuromancer. I read that decades ago, so I don't remember anything. I gather from context that "cyberdeck" is a slang for "retro laptop" or "retro tablet"?
- I wanted one of these as a kid, but I recall that it was something like $1000, which was an outrageous amount of money to be begging of parents with no money. When I see articles like this, I feel a tinkle of temptation. But I always ask myself, "What would I do with it?" And the answer is always: "Not much".
I currently use the MacBook Air 11" (2013) as my non-programming daily driver. The MBA11 is actually smaller, lighter, cheaper, orders of magnitude faster, with orders of magnitude more memory and storage, with far larger screen, a 100% sized keyboard, and wifi internet access. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the MBA11 ran the Model 100 emulator (https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualt/) faster than the real Model 100.
So a real Model 100 doesn't make any sense for me. But these little gadgets from the 80s are always tempting...
- I was under the impression that mechanical floppy drives are usually replaced with floppy drive emulators which work with standard USB flash drives. A cheap 4GB flash drive emulate thousands of floppy disks, which is kinda nuts.
- Yes. From the 8-bit era. Definitely the case. 8–bit Floppy disks can be pretty easily. emulated. But I’m thinking about slightly later gen things like ISA cards for MFM and RLL hard drives. 1.2 and 720/1.44 floppies. I have a Lenovo usb 3.5” drive. But nothing for 1.2 mb 5.25. Maybe almost nobody does. Zip and jazz drives. Gone. Even Sata is stating to dry up.
- I'm not familiar with the ATmega32A, but at first glance at the datasheet, it seems to offer about the same features and performance as the ATmega328P used on the 8-bit Arduino UNO and Nano. The article says "ATmega32A MCU acts as an I/O subsystem, 'emulating' the EPROM and all the I/O components".
What I find funny is that the ATmega32A is probably at least 4X faster than the Z80 at the same clock speed, maybe even 10X faster. The ATmega executes one instruction per cycle, while the the Z80 needs at least 4 cycles per instruction. But even more, the AVR8 instruction set includes hardware multiplication, far better indexing modes, and lots of general purpose registers (if I recall 32-bit?). It wouldn't surprise me if the 16MHz AVR could emulate a Z80 at say 1-2 MHz.
I have a soft spot for the Z80, and I think all projects involving them are cool. But I always wonder where a Z80 hardware kit fits in the world today.
- For those who've never heard of LGP-30, here's the wikipedia link, because the landing page doesn't explain what LGP-30 is either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGP-30
"The LGP-30, standing for Librascope General Purpose and then Librascope General Precision, is an early off-the-shelf computer. It was manufactured by the Librascope company of Glendale, California (a division of General Precision Inc.), and sold and serviced by the Royal Precision Electronic Computer Company, a joint venture with the Royal McBee division of the Royal Typewriter Company. The LGP-30 was first manufactured in 1956,[1][2][3] at a retail price of $47,000, equivalent to $510,000 in 2022."
- Author here. Another tag that could be applied to this item is "z80".
The TI-83+ and TI-84+ may be the cheapest way to get into Z80 assembly language programming these days. They go for about $20-30 on eBay, sometime cheaper locally. The programming environment has some non-trivial TI-OS layer that you have to punch through, and the dev tools are a bit clunky, but once you get past that, your inner Z80 programming can take over: read the keyboard, write characters to the LCD screen, write pixels to the screen, and so on. The TI 83 Plus SDK provides access to various low-level OS functions.
The main discussion about the calculator features of the RPN83P app is happening on the MoHPC site: https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-20867.html
- It's also used in millions of TI-83+ and TI-84+ calculators.
- Its how I first got into assembly - writing it for the TI-85
- TIL, something really cool. I still use my 12c from early 80s
- If you are a fan of RPN, you might appreciate my ongoing RPN83P app for TI-83+ and TI-84+: https://github.com/bxparks/rpn83p
Discussions at MoHPC: https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-20867.html
- The landing page doesn't explains what SDL is, so here are some links that provide context if you were wondering like I was:
- I am suffering a similar level of pain right now. I wrote about ~18,000 lines of Z80 assembly language (w/ ~5000 lines of comments) in the past few months. I can feel the pace of development slowly grinding down, because each new feature or refactoring requires the manual testing of the previous features that have already been added to the app. In other words, my development process has become O(N^2).
I feel like I will be forced to create some sort of testing framework at some point, to have any hope of extending the app beyond a certain level of complexity. But I currently have no idea how that can be done in an assembly language project. So I am trying to delay the inevitable for as long as possible.
(The dev environment is the TI-83+ and TI-84+ series of calculators using the Z80 processor, if you are curious.)
- To test. You just need some sort of means to set up the call to your subroutine, call your subroutine, and and then check the results of memory or registers after the return. The code sample posted by spec476 is good example. If your assembler doesn’t have such a feature, you either need a conditional assembly directive or a way to cut your routine out of your assembly file and blend it with your test with something like Python or a ruby
- More
For those that don’t know ..What people are actually building is a laptop, but they are emulating a "cyberdeck" which was a portable computer used by hackers to jack into cyberspace in William Gibson's 1984 book "Neuromancer". A jacked user experienced cyberspace as a virtual reality. Geeks like myself who build these things try to trick out the laptop to look retro or futuristic that never happened. In some similar ways to Steampunk. They also looked like the military grade laptops in Aliens or Space: Above and Beyond.
These are are some good examples of them. some are just art that is kick ass; some work as real equipment, but it should totally say "80s" when you see them: https://www.mrjakeparker.com/blog/2022/3/15/cyberdecks