- What a wild thing. A university level course writing code for a machine that’s over 45 and very rare to have. Just wow ….
If I ever get the chance to purchase one I will …
- And here is a tool to browse and navigate it: https://github.com/rochus-keller/LisaPascal
- You can check out the source code of the OS and the 7/7 office applications, written in Pascal (and a bit of 68k assembler, of course) at the CHM: https://computerhistory.org/press-releases/chm-makes-apple-l.../
- I used to run it on my 286 with half of it on a 3.5" floppy and the other half of the files on a disc in my 5.25" drive. I didn't have a HDD to run it from at first.
- Kinda blazed over the Talkspot/WorldStream thing. Was actively involved in that and my boss had the "pleasure" having technical debates with Ken (a billionaire at the time). A lot of ex-Sierra folks were there and ended up working in Fintech with me. Some will still tell tales of how they coded some of those early games.
- Glad to see them enjoying themselves and enjoying their well deserved earnings. Sierra games were great, and have aged amazingly well. I still play through King's Quest 3 every couple of years.
- By definition, everything on this site is out of date :-)
If there is a more complete, up to date account that covers the past and the intervening time available please share.
- Seriously out of date. Based on the screen shot, this is from 2014 or 2015? Since then they've changed to a new boat (Grand Banks GB60). They've also returned to gaming, with the release of "Colossal Cave".
- The old machines have a soul. Built by people who made the machine they wanted for themselves. From the era before Google when many of the many joys things could be discovering what the machine could do. Or gathering at user groups to ask questions or share tips. Like alchemists fiddling about trying to make gold.
Modern computers . The magic is gone. More gigabytes , gigahertz than you can shake a stick at. Now there are a million blogs or YouTube channels proclaiming :(Solved) whatever the curiosity.
Now. With attrition. It’s back to discovery again. I recently met a friend 2 blocks from home who has an Atari 800. We drink scotch and play tag team defender. We take turns piloting while the other hitters the smart bomb spacebar.
- not everything needs to be connected to the internet. it's nice to have an old simple system that is secure because it's connected to nothing. it's solid, reliable and doesn't need megabytes or gigabyte of updates to keep secure.
solid hardware built to last. this is selection bias at it's best mind as the ones we collect are the ones that have survived and not the flimsy cheap systems that died early. problems that do exist have been rectified or worked around so there should be no nasty shocks in the next 10 years with them.
single tasking. it allows us to focus on doing one thing and doing it well. we've grown too used to having 10-20 programs running at same time and swapping between them. it can be beneficial to concentrate on just one thing avoid distractions.
- Loved this game! A few weeks ago I actually took the train to Dundee and saw the lemmings statues and the site of the original office the company built the game from!
- This is so pointless and great. I love it!
- I love this so much. When I was a lad - I could pick out Mac floppy and hard disk sounds vs Seagate MFM vs Conner Peripherals 40mb IDE drives in movies. Such an oddly satisfying thing! Made my week!
- Note that the version history on unixdude's site is not up to date, the most recent version is 3.1, which was published by Andreas yesterday.
The current source code can be found in the "branch_softfloat" branch on sourceforge's svn: https://sourceforge.net/projects/previous/
- I guy I worked with years ago used one of these as part of a delivery job he had in college. He wrote a Basic program to do all the paperwork and it made him the most efficient driver the company had. It was a remarkably useful computer.
- Fun read!
I grew up with Apple at school, Atari at home.
The Atari machines were well conceived in some ways mentioned in the article. SIO peripheral connections came with device independent I/O support in ROM, for example.
Another was the controller ports! Paddles, joysticks, trac-balls, and more were useful for games, and other things! The joystick ports delivered 16 bits of bidirectional I/O that I found useful.
And there is FujiNET! Until that device showed up, my Atari gathered dust.
I have never quit using my Apple 2e though.
It is the better 8 bit workstation and the ability to add expansion cards, PC style is what really made the difference! Doing that is not cheap, but it is powerful.
The one item I crave is 80 column text, and the Apple does that well, and does reasonable color graphics well, no sprites aside.
Back in the day, that text got me on the Internet, was good for office type work, writing papers, programming.
Interestingly, I can get a FujiNET for my Apple, meaning both machines can participate in games and applications online!
- One thing not mentioned was how bloody slow the 1542 disk system was compared to an Atari 810 or 1050 drive. I remember there were specialty cartridges to make the disk faster but didn’t help.
The 810 was twice the speed but half the capacity of the 1541.
- Here's to the Crazy ones. The ones still using their computer long after it should have been retired. I am not lucky to have an original Mac (with a signed inside case) but I do still use my Atari 1200xl at least a little but not as my daily driver like these folks do.
- I made money in my teens helping people wire real keyboards on these. Miniaturized version. Don’t really understand.
Still waiting for the modernized 800xl from Revive
- Yep, just wget. Here's my wget-mirror shell function, newlines added for readability:
wget-mirror () { wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites --no-parent --content-disposition --header="Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:119.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/122.0" --restrict-file-names="windows,nocontrol" -e robots=off --no-check-certificate "$1" } - a recent podcast on the jupiter ace i found interesting. https://radiopublic.com/advent-of-computing-60Q1LB/s1!cb0eb
- Remember watching this as a child when it came out Yul Brynner was terrifying, so relentless. And the SFX were so realistic for me. The heat/infrared vision images. A total experience for me who was younger than the recommended 14 years old.
- Happy new year!
- Hey there, fellow nerds and geeks! Happy 24 to all who find joy in the aroma of solder, the thrill of twiddling bits, nostalgia of retro gaming and keepers of the Konami Code! Up, up, down, down, happy 24 to us all!
🎮🔧👾
- Merry Christmas. Thanks for creating Two Stop Bits!
- Merry Christmas! Thank you for making the site that I've so often wanted to exist!
- Thanks for the links.
Here is yet another one: https://github.com/rochus-keller/LisaPascal
- There's a second Lisa emulator, idle (Incomplete Draft of a Lisa Emulator):
There are quite a lot of activities around the Lisa right now. A number of projects recreate the Lisa hardware using (mostly) original components:https://idle-lisa-emu.sourceforge.nethttps://github.com/warmech/lisa-hardware/
https://github.com/alexthecat123/Lisa-PCBs/
https://github.com/alexthecat123/Lisa-GALSCSI-Card/
Patrick Schäfer has provided Lisa hardware and tools for many years:
http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/patrick/idefile.htm
and there is an Arduino-based ProFile hard disk emulator (currently only working with the Lisa 2/5 I/O board):
https://github.com/alexthecat123/ArduinoFile
...plus one based on a BeagleBoard:
http://www.arcanebyte.com/harddrive-product/
...bigmessowires' floppy emulator, which also works with Lisas
https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/
...and, of course, the Lisa OS and application source code which was published in early 2023:
https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-lisa-apples-most-influe.../
...plus more interesting source code including GEM, e.g. available at:
- The RM Nimbus PC-186 was moderately popular in UK educational facilities, and obviously used the 80186.
Once upon a time I came across some unnamed PC clone, skulking in our university's business department that actually used the even rarer 80188, at the time no-one even believed me that it existed, but the modern internet thankfully makes it clear that it did.
- More
The crown of "Best 8-Bit CPU" should probably go to the little known 6309 CPU, an advanced variant of the 6809 made by Hitachi under license from Motorola (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_6309). It booted up fully compatible with the 6809 but could be switched to a 'native mode' where it would execute 6809 instructions 30% faster, have more registers added and a significant number of additional instructions including divide. Being fabbed in CMOS, it could also be clocked much higher than the 6809's 2 Mhz, up to 3.58 Mhz.
Anyone wanting to create "The Ultimate 8-Bit Microcomputer" from early 80s components would want to start with a 6309 as the CPU and perhaps marry it to the 9958 video display processor used in 8-bit MSX2 computers which was probably the most advanced VDP of the era since the 6847 VDP Motorola designed for the 6809 was extremely basic with no sprites or extended palette features. For sound the best 8-bit era chip would be one of the Yamaha FM chips commonly used in MSX2 machines. Unfortunately, no manufacturer ever married these components into a world-beating Ultimate 8-Bit. It would have been an amazing machine for the time and certainly held the position as top hobbyist lust-bait - at least until the arrival of the 68000-based Amiga.