- reminds me of the computer story/fable/legend/myth
- i harbour plans to set up a cpm system for home use. for an offline never connected to the web system. any rasp pi will at some point be connected no matter how barebones i make it. for updates, for convenience. with cpm there'll be far less incentive to do so.
a decent text editor, a spreadsheet, a basic compiler, maybe a small database. nothing fancy. distraction free, no worries about security, just 1 cpu and a limited amount of ram and storage working for me and me alone.
- Seems like there is a ton of good dev software available too.
Some time back, I read about a CP/M portable --Amstrad I think, where the creator had setup compilers for just about any language available pre 2005 or so.
Would be a neat machine
- amstrad had many weird and wonderful portable devices but none ran cpm out of the box iirc.
but it did ring a bell when you said cpm and amstrad. there was this: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/hh3rrp.../
- in the 80s we used an interfaker to connect parallel ports to a serial port to capture data from cpm and non dos computers that otherwise could not transfer data to a pc.
https://live.staticflickr.com/4155/34580317352_3b87d19630_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 was so close to buying a hp95lx back in the day. i needed a mobile computer, i couldn't afford a laptop. the dos compatibility was a huge plus.
in the end i knew a lot of the software i ran wouldn't run in the confined space of a hp95lx and the keyboard was... lacking.
in the end i went with a psion 3a. better keyboard. while there was zero compatibility it steered me towards using open formats to get information on and off systems. something i still do today.
i never saw a hp95lx or it's successors in use in ireland but i did see a lot of psions.
- annoying but it's a problem with all museums. they have far too many items to display make available. most have huge archives of stuff that will never see the light of day.
it would be interesting to see if there's a follow up and what the organisation did to try and avoid dumping them.
- Responsible organizations have other options, such as stopping accepting new submissions when storage space runs out, or looking for a new good home for the excess material they can no longer store. Or, at the very least, notify the original submitter they can no longer store the material.
- A simple phone call like "hey, sorry, we have no time/space/energy to do anything with your stuff, pick it up or it will be destroyed by $DEADLINE" would certainly have solved the problem
- i remember buying the version for palmos and when i had a palm iiic getting the colour version. was a great game on the platform. whiled away many an hour playing it. one of my favourite games on the platform.
i also had it on the original playstation. bought it second hand for 20 quid. didn't think it would be a fun play using a controller but it worked well enough.
- amstrad made great 8 bit computers that were just a little too late to the party. bbc, c64 and zx spectrum dominated at that point. when amstrad bought sinclair and began making spectrums the keyboards got a lot better.
they also had their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW line which were z80 based 8bit business computers. a last gasp of cpm that sold for a fraction of the cost of ibm compatibles. they turned up all the time when i was starting out in the 80s.
- i love the zx spectrum but the keyboard was an acquired taste at best. only thing preventing me from buying a zx spectrum laptop is that the keyboard is too spectrum like. :-)
- if someone made a small palm alike device on which this ran i'd buy one in a heart beat.
still rocking my psion organiser 3mx. 2mb of storage! :-)
- played it on zx spectrum, a LOT great game. computer hide and seek. always on the move, trying to stay ahead of the sentinel or it's sentries.
what amused me at the time was that there are 10,000 levels loaded in from tape and within a few weeks of it being released magazines had accumulated codes for all of them from readers playing at home iirc. pre internet that was a lot of information gathering.
- More
If you ask my colleagues they might say I’m still not ;-)
Reading opcodes, binary patching.. Hard stuff, when you fight for few bytes to do jmp to add extra little functionality or fix a bug.