saundby

On people introducing themselves, I'm not new here, but I've been lurking and doing occasional downloads since this topic had one page. Thanks for the scans, and to those doing the mirrors, thanks to you, too! I've mostly been downloading the '75 and '76 issues. About the only issues I've got left from that time frame are the 0.01 Centennial issue and the Star Trek Memory Alpha cover issue. I didn't hang on to most magazines until after high school unless there was something I saw as particularly special about it. I've always said I wish I could subscribe to magazines from 30+ years ago as opposed to what passes for a magazine today (mostly advertisements for third-rate websites). Now I can! Thanks again.

Identity wouldn't be that hard to establish then, and you'd just apply for a new SSN if you wanted to get one. They weren't required then. My parents got me an SSN when I was little, but plenty of people I know never bothered to get one until they got their first regular in-house type job. Many construction workers I knew were paid in cash on Friday and didn't have one. So not having one wasn't a big deal. Birth certificate? Easy, peasy. The hospital you were born in burned down, or you were born at home and your parents were cagey and never had a doctor issue a certificate to the county or whatever. Many parents didn't know the difference between a real birth certificate and the showy one with the ribbons on it anyway. In my own case, I know of relatives who were born at the right general times, but died young in a county other than where they were born. Chances are, I could get one of their birth certificates issued as my own since there were no computer linked databases. Heck, the cops couldn't hardly track you if you crossed state or county lines unless you were someone they were really, really interested in. A world without linked-up databases is a very different world. For most employers your I.D. consisted of you signing your contract with a note at the bottom saying that you were aware that you might be guilty of perjury if you lied on your employment forms. I never showed I.D. to an employer until the 80s, after the immigration bill fiasco. I just wrote my information on my forms and signed at the bottom and that was that. If you needed a government clearance, there was more you had to do to establish identity, but in commercial work your say-so was typically enough. References were more important than paper. Which is why I'd start at a repair shop. Then there'd be references to say that I showed up to work on time and sober, and that I seem like a regular sorta guy (who's unusually lucky on sports bets much of the time. But not too much so. ) Also, having a suit and a proper haircut counted for a lot then for better jobs, whereas today they don't so much. I'd want to save up to buy a suit that'll get me into the better class of jobs. Different times, different standards.

I didn't start programming digital computers until 1972, but I started with the IBM 1130 in FORTRAN on an 026 keypunch, later I graduated to the much-desired 029 keypunch. The next system I worked on was an IBM 360. They were school systems, so they were older than the current systems, but computers also didn't age then as quickly as they age today. I can still crank the original FORTRAN or FORTRAN IV if I need to. Also, in 1978, IBM donated a 709 to our high school when our administration expressed interest in a computer. Our school's administration had no idea what it was, to them a computer was a computer. IBM gave them the computer for free then tried to sell them a $20K/year support contract. I let them know that the 709 wasn't the computer they thought it was, and talked them into giving it to the electronics lab (where I was T.A.) Then I learned to program it (with patchboards), and had a great time with it for a few months along with a couple of the other advanced students. Then we had the Electronics 2 class tear it down for parts for our bins, since it wasn't really worth keeping and the likelyhood of anyone being able to use it once we left was about nil. That's the sort of system I'd be looking to get a job on in the early 60s, and if transported there I can claim actual experience with one (in a day and age when most people had never even seen a computer.) I also worked with another system from that era in a job in the 80's, when we were transferring a process that used an IBM 1401 (more of a tabulator than a computer) to a more modern system. We moved the job to a VAX II, and once it was done I spent a lot of my spare time seeing what I could get out of the 1401 before we sent it off for disposal. Once you get into the mindset of what it's capable of, you can really do a lot with it, but you need a lot of hand work to feed it each sucessive job to complete a sort of programmed process. Imagine having humans as your scripting language feeding programs with data transferred between them and operating the processes on a modern system. So there's my early 60's experience. The 1130 and 360 are my mid/late 60's experience, along with analog computers (EIA TR-10s and such.) Before I started on the IBM 1130 in 1972, I was working with home-built analog computers. My programming language was literally solder. I had functions built up on perfboards, and when I wanted to do something different, I'd take the old circuit apart and rewire them into a new program. I couldn't afford the connectors to build up patchboards of any sort, so I just hard-wired my programs. After all, I originally got into electronics because I couldn't afford model railroading. I started fixing radios, then TVs, to earn money. And got hooked on electronics because it was cheap and turned out to be fun once an adult gave me a book on op amp applications that showed me how to build all my analog computer circuits. I remember the Mitnick thing as it was happening. Let's say that it looks larger in retrospect than it did as it happened. Two or three books and a business based on the notoriety that came after will do that. There were other things that happened, bigger than that. But they didn't get the press and public notoriety. And that's still true today. As to loginout being hacked, there were several replacements for it around, and similar hacks for other systems. Generally, at the time they weren't really necessary. Computer security was so lax that you could pretty well expect to be able to access a system once you knew what type of system it was. And all that took was seeing the login prompt. Probably about half of systems had a reasonable level of security, and half you could walk in to just by seeing the prompt and using the factory defaults or knowing what was a routine setup for the computer company's support staff. They had standard passwords they'd use, like the company initials and 5 digit phone number of the customer's front office--that was one company's routine. Patching loginout on VAX took access beforehand. Getting in with pat passwords didn't, you could go in and do what you liked without any set up. In my own case, I actually used such access to correct problems with my employer's and my customer's systems (I was working as an electronics tech and later engineer on defense systems during the day, and doing commercial computer consulting at night.) I'd always let people know what I'd done. It's interesting, though, that of many such incidents I was only questioned once about how I got administrative access without being granted it through "proper channels." Things were a lot looser before about '88 and '89. Even at that it wasn't until the mid 90's and the general knowledge of networking and the internet that anyone really started taking security seriously on a lot of large systems, especially at mid-level businesses where the MIS department usually consisted of one full time person and a couple of others who took time away from their jobs to help out occasionally. I thought we were talking about the 60s? Kevin Mitnick and the loginout patch was much later!

Super Pong for me, too. I like being right there with my opponent. I have some sentimental attachment from seeing it fire up in "living color" after playing my friend's Magnavox Odyssey for some time in pure white on grey with the overlays being the only color. The color just pushed the cool factor through the roof. Nowadays, the cool factor comes from loading it up with 'D' cells in front of the guests who are about to enjoy this blast from the past. I couldn't get better reactions if the thing had a wind-up key on the back. My TV Games doesn't look nearly so good. It looks like a tank drove over it. Still works, though. But the controllers are not as nice as the Atari's, to me. And it plugs in. Anyone can have a game that plugs in. Only the elite have one that runs off monster sized batteries. And yes, I do have a battery powered TV to go with it, for when the power's out. But I usually hook it up to the 50" 16:9 big screen. Atari never looked so gooood.

I'd probably just wash it by hand. My dishwasher runs darn hot.

Any metal body low end lab scope works fine. The lowest magnification should be no more than 10x. I use 10x and 25x magnification the most. On my main triple turret scope, I usually keep it fitted out at 10x, 25x and 40x, plus I have a 4x magnifier on my lamp (which gets used for quick inspections and for reading numbers off components more readily than moving over to the microscope.) It's hard to get scopes that have low enough magnification, and then there are ones with plastic bodies now, which let in light and ruin the image. The key is to get objectives with low magnification, and a 10x or lower eyepiece. Just like telescopes, they tend to sell the low end models with magnification levels that are too high to be really useful, especially for beginners. I've written a bit about choosing a good microscope in a blog entry about buying telescopes as gifts, the section on microscopes is at the end of the article: Microscopes advice (Microscopes as Gifts).

Chroma is received as an Analog signal from the TIA chip so it would not "pass through" the buffer chip. Parker Gotcha. I tend not to think of Luma as digital, though of course here it is since it's just two level. I was scratching my head over that. I thought maybe there was something going on along the lines of CMOS magic, though I didn't see it. Now I see it's just a two level signal. I guess then the question would be, why not use analog amps on both channels (luma, chroma) to maintain the phase relationship? Luma has no real need for a digital buffer. You're just looking to drive a low impedance line, so a pair of low gain amps (a max gain of 2 should make up for any losses) should do the trick without causing timing problems. A reasonably high frequency dual op amp would probably do it. You'd just want to make sure the slew rate is up to par, probably about 250V/uS or better. Anything that can give that good a slew rate will have plenty of bandwidth for old fashioned NTSC or PAL video. Alternatively, a 4016 or 4066 could be used to delay the analog signal if you don't mind adding another component alongside the 4050. Anyway, I'm not trying to tell you how to do it, just suggesting options. There are a number of things to manage in any design, I'm just looking at your phase relationship problem here.

The Intelligent Microcomputer, by Roy W. Goody, SRA click on the link for a pic of the book and a brief description. Available on abebooks.com for <$5 including shipping. Also, some of the old programmer's manuals that have been scanned and posted have a good section on how the microprocessor itself works. The Vic-20 programmer's guide is a good one as I recall. One of the Atari assembly language books is good, too, but I've forgotten which one it was I liked.

Howdy! LE, I was looking at your history page on your video mod and saw your notes about fighting gate delays on LUMA vs. CHROMA. With the 4050 mod I'm familiar with, there are spare gates on the 4050. Have you considered just putting CHROMA through a spare gate to give it the same delay as LUMA? If this has already been discussed, just point me there. I admit I didn't read all 25 pages of the thread.

A good source for microscopes: http://www.surplusshed.com/ Good metal body scopes cheap. My soldering station is a cheap Weller station that I added a diode and switch to for temp adjustment. I got a desoldering tool, but it gathers dust now since I've gone back to wick, solder-sucker, and tweezers/pliers. I also use desoldering tips I made out of aluminum channel stock and screws that fit the Weller. They're fitted to different ICs. I can also use them for reflow.

I've always thought the O2 was prime for mods. So much space in that box, and everything's easy to get to. I'd really like to expand RAM and make a BASIC cart that takes advantage of the expanded RAM. It's a shame the RAM signals didn't get brought out to the cartridge port, but a mod could put more RAM in the console. That wouldn't even require changing the 8048's ROM (by putting an 8748 in instead.) A higher clock speed would change so much you'd pretty much be building a whole new system in the box, so that's out, as nice as it would be. Everything is lockstepped to the video. The 8048 would be good with 3.58MHz, and memories could be swapped out for something faster, but I don't know about the video IC (the schematic I've seen doesn't say what it is, it practically looks like it just reads video ram and latches it for the encoder.) The software would have to change for the higher speed and resolution, so an 8748 becomes necessary. The encoder and RF modulator can be bypassed, with good RGB output, who'd want them? But overall this would be as much or more work as building a new video game system from scratch. A nice analog RGB video output would be easy, it appears. And an external keyboard. A microcontroller running a USB port that pulls the appropriate lines on the O2's keyswitch matrix when a USB keyboard key is pressed would do the trick. It's funny, most old keyboards have an 8031 in them as a controller. The 8031 is a close cousin to the O2's 8048. The microcontroller to interface the two would be more powerful than both put together. Power supply. IIRC the one it has is a linear. Ick. Plenty of room for a cool little switcher supply inside the box. I'll look at this while I'm finishing my present project.

Thanks for posting the link answering your question! I'm going to be doing it myself soon, since I can't just jump in the time machine and pick up a bunch of keyboards from when Jameco was blowing out their remaining stock 15 years ago or so.

What I'd do would depend on which end of the 1960s I was dropped in. Either way, no problemo. Jan. 1, 1960: I've programmed IBM 1401s and IBM 709s, so once I got a suit and a haircut I could get a really good job. I can repair typewriters to raise the initial cash (that helped put me through college-most profs wouldn't take dot matrix print-outs so even students with computers had to type.) I can also repair and upgrade TVs from the period, not to mention radios (how I earned money as a kid.) I'd start writing about technology for extra cash in the evenings, and projects for hobby mags. I'd do transistor projects to start with, then op-amps and analog computers once op-amps get cheap. I'd also do digital projects with RTL and video game projects for both TVs and o-scopes. I'd also put cash into IBM as early as possible, and probably Standard Oil. Buy into aerospace during the mid sixties surge then sell off before the LBJ/Nixon cuts. Bet on the Mets right after the Tigers take the '68 World Series. Once the Super Bowl is invented, my fortune is made. Dec 30, 1969: I started with FORTRAN on the IBM 1130 and 360, and can still do it, so there's a good paying job. Typewriters, TVs, and radios will still get me started out until I get the suit and haircut. Nobody cares what you look like in the back of a repair shop. Write on technology and electronics, as before, and be in Silicon Gulch. Maybe even take a job at Fairchild to get into the right circles for the micro revolution early. Write 2K and 4K BASIC implementations early, and be ready to port once uP's appear. Build a computer out of MSI and SSI logic while I wait. There are few people as prepared to live in the past as I am. Now I've just got to get this "future" thing worked out. ...just checked my website. Epic Fail on the future thing. Building a new 8085 computer? What's wrong with me? *sigh* I guess I've just got to go on living in the past. Good thing I like Jethro Tull.