- That’s a great story, thanks for sharing. Where in the world did you deploy 1000 Amiga 500s?
- While I love the idea, e-waste is too good for these infernal machines. I expect them to rot for all eternity in the pits of the far reaches of hell, but enjoying life far more than the executives who came up with ink subscriptions.
- These machines didn’t ask to be built this way. It’s their greedy ink overlords that did this. Mechano rights now! :-)
As I said elsewhere the shenanigans with ink didn’t start until recently. That era of printer is probably ok. It’s all in the choice you make. I just bought a brother Lp for my mother in law. Printer and 1 toner was c$370/U$. Will last rest of her life. With about 3500 pages of capacity. However the software world will surely change but when I take possession of it again I hope this solution still works so I can make use of it …
- But can it play Doom?
Looks very interesting. It had me at Boulder Dash.
- Wow, yeah, they are cool as well.
- I’ve been around retro since it wasn’t but these things I’ve never seen before and are absolutely fantastically gorgeous. I hope we get back to experiencing the computer experience again, like a the vinyl revival we’ve been seeing for a while, instead of the boring (but also powerful, amazing, from my cold, dead hands) computing experience of the mid 2020’s.
Thanks for sharing.
- If ever you get the chance to talk to David Pleasance, who I met I Kickstart in the UK last year, you should. He’ll talk your ear off but after reading his books and then hearing his stories it like there’s colours you’ve never heard of or seen before become real. He’s a character with loads of insight into C= in the UK and Europe and has some great stories (not in the books!) about his trips to the US.
Like many of you, I expect, as a kid Amiga transcended the pettiness of everyday life, but, funny enough, Commodore was a company just like any other and not really that special (except for the way “someone” drove it into the ground).
- I know it’s DD, but how dare he! Grey? It’s beige AND grey! And often yellow these days!
He’s right about the speccy though, that rubber-keyed wonder still looks cool.
- This is probably more than your friend ever wanted to know, allow me to introduce you, er them, to "IEC dissected", by Jan Derogee.
https://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/programming/serial-b...
- Thats neat, never come across anything like that before.
- i've only ever seen them twice. one my boss had and 1 on site at a engineers office.
one of those obscure pieces of hardware around before the internet and apart from a few photos on auction sites doesn't exist online.
https://www.tzsupplies.com/modular-technology-mt25-iv-interf.../
and a 1 page pdf of the manual. https://docs.rs-online.com/e9af/0900766b8001aeab.pdf
- I remember seeing this a while ago, and my memory was jogged when reading this thread about Timex / Sinclair printers on the ZX World forums.
- More
The company was started by a former realtor who'd spent his career in new construction residential sales and knew the biz inside out. New construction residential sales has distinct needs different from residential resales. So he wrote a software program in BASIC on a Radio Shack Color Computer to do exactly what a new construction sales person needs to do. This involves calculating the financing options including the down payment, monthly payments, taxes and insurance for all the various loan options available, like 30-yr fixed, 15-yr adjustable rate and then sending prospective buyers home with a customized printout showing their options based on their particulars including down payment, rate, credit score, etc.
It was really quite complex under the hood, yet it made all this easy for a sales agent to present clearly to even novice home buyers. It turns out that doing this is well is key to selling the builder's growing inventory of homes and, obviously, there's a lot of money tied up in such a development. However, new home construction companies aren't IT savvy and the vast majority of realtors (especially circa 1980) had never even seen a computer in person before. So, this guy burned his custom BASIC program into auto-booting EPROM cartridges and offered a complete solution for a monthly lease (including installation, training, service and support). Since these Radio Shack computers where just a few hundred dollars and his system was extremely valuable to such construction companies, his little garage business grew like wildfire. I think I was the third or fourth employee he hired and we were still working out of his house. Eventually, the software became so complex that it wouldn't fit in a ROM cartridge anymore (even after I wrote a pretty neat assembly language program that patched ROM bank switching commands into the computer's BASIC allowing the programs to do JUMPs to other banks). And that's when we started looking to move off the 64K 8-bit Color Computer to a 16-bit platform with more memory and disk storage - and I convinced him the Amiga 500 would be ideal (which it was)!
Anyway, the program had evolved to become really perfect for doing this one, extremely valuable yet highly specialized thing and the little company grew fast and was highly profitable. He could charge quite a bit for the monthly lease because no salesperson who'd used it ever wanted to sell without it. It was really that good. In fact, the lease required the first two and last two months payments up front, and this was enough to basically pay for the computer, monitor, printer, power strip, etc. So after that, the rest of the lease contract was all profit (although, service, support and ongoing training had to be available 10 hours a day, seven days a week, including weekend onsite system replacement if necessary (which could involve driving over four or five hours round-trip on a Sunday if you were on-call that weekend)) so the customers definitely got value for their money. And supporting this highly specialized, extremely deep application took at least a full year for a new person to learn (if they were sharp) which is why in the early days we three software coders were also the support, training and field service staff). While strange in today's world, that's probably why this software became so damn polished to perfection for this use case.
For example, after selecting a home model, to update the main financing screen showing all the different loan options, all the agent had to do was punch a different interest rate, monthly payment, or down payment on the 10-key and it would recalculate all the loans with the new parameter. They didn't even have to select an input field because the program dynamically figured out based on the value typed and the sales price if the entered value should be interpreted as a rate, monthly payment or down payment.
In an era before spreadsheets, without this program, it took these agents at least three minutes to change one parameter for one loan on a manual TI paper-tape adding machine. But our program recalced a dozen loans in two seconds (including every possible option from full amortization tables to rate buy-downs). This made providing full, clear and detailed answers to every customer question trivial (like "How much more do I need to put down to reduce the monthly payment by $500?"). To these sales people this seemed like literal voodoo magic ("How does it know that what I typed in was the desired monthly payment?") :-)
Last I heard the company had transitioned the program to Windows PCs sometime in the mid-90s and was still around in some form post-2000.
My uncle Bob (seriously, I have the generic uncle "Bob"), developed real estate contracts using a combination of C64 BASIC and some word processor that allowed for conditional and parametric document assembly, almost Word Perfect style!
He built up quite a business with those efforts!
A bit later a friend wrote an entire trucking business on the PC running GWBASIC.
I myself started out on a beat up Atari 400 with the Atari BASIC cartridge and the cassette storage peripheral I struggle to recall the name of right now.... 410! That was it.
I wrote TV test and alignment programs. Learned all that working at a TV repair shop as a kid. The Atari had just a couple capabilities that made a huge difference too!
One of those was at least 8 grey shades. I know GTIA could deliver 16 and I ended up using them once I made enough to get a newer 800 XL machine.
Another feature was full overscan graphics. 48 bytes per line instead of 40. That made it possible to draw the full frame patterns and properly identify the safe area for viewers wanting the factory setup, and expand viewing for others without showing blank non raster regions on their screen.
Side bar:
Older sets would often under scan by quite a bit! Correcting that often meant a lot to those viewers.
End Side bar
Another feature was enough colors to calibrate a TV for good color more than close enough. I could get purity tests, set color delay phase and some other items pretty well!
Last feature was 320 pixels in the safe area NTSC. That is two pixels per color clock cycle. When set to monochrome, those pixels were just right for focus, convergence, linearity and the whole test pattern.
All this was some percent off the pro gear, but I found out most people do not care. And I mostly didn't either.
As a famous YouTube I love says, "Good enough for the girls I go out with" (AvE)
BASIC with a few PEEK and POKE commands and the occasional bit of machine language was enough to do a lot!
COMPUTE! Published a nice assembler and disassembler too. For some work, a guy could get setup well enough to produce good programs.
Getting back to XP...
I wrote the above for perspective. Of course XP can make sense. So can DOS, an Amiga, and Windows 3.11, just ask Southwest airlines.
Fact is many of us here can probably work magic with whatever gets put into our hands. I can.
And all these skills couple with microcontrollers too.
Perhaps that warrants discussion here too one day. The skills are a great match and when one can build hardware feature matched to the use case?
Boom goes the Dynamite!