How Do I keep motivated to program for classic computers?

[Keatah]

"How Do I keep motivated to program for classic computers?"

 

Back in the day I picked out 2 books (out of about 15) that matched my style and grade level (was a kid in primary school). And read through them. Then when I got real hardware I was able try out the examples and get right into it. I would then follow the superb documentation that came with the Apple II.

 

Motivation wasn't an issue. It was the brave new world of the Information Age. When tech magazines like BYTE were sold at the grocery store. When there was so much to discovery and learn. Everything was in the pioneering phase. And we didn't know how long it would last. How far it would go. Curiosity was around every corner, hidden in every nook and cranny. Placed there just for me by giants and captains of industry.

 

Just imagine how much of an adventure it was getting a memory upgrade from 48K to 64K! Imagine the possibilities that I could put DOS in it, high up and away from my BASIC program. Thus giving me 10 more K to write in a clock-read routine or spin the cursor decoratively. It was an all-day affair too. As exciting as getting a new videogame console or a bag full of cartridges.

 

It was one action that helped solidify memory concepts and separation of my own program and DOS and firmware and RAM and ROM. It was even my first exposure to an SSD. That's right. Eventually that 16K got upgraded to 64K and then 512K. And for all the "size-grades" I had a RAMDISK program. It was I*N*C*R*E*D*I*B*L*E loading a game in like 3 seconds VS 15 from disk and 10 MINUTES from tape. Even more magic running my BBS logs from it. Instant signon with no waiting on the user's part.

 

That's just but one exciting instance out of many that occurred in the 80's. We never knew what was going to happen next.

 

There were of course days we didn't care about any of that. I'd just not turn the computer on and instead go do something else. There was no pressure. There was no script to follow. I'd learn very organically without structure. One day it might be drawing spirals and circles. Another peeking and poking at softswitches. Everything was built on being curious and finding out how something worked and why. The learning came in the discovery of the answers.

 

Start with the simple stuff. Take $600 and buy a reliable classic computer, monitor, disk drive, the original manual, and a couple of period books!

[AMSDOS]

3 hours ago, Bruce Tomlin said:

Did you even pay attention what I quoted? It was about using leading colons for indentation, not for multiple statements. How do you indent with a REM anyhow?

 

FOR I = 1 TO 10

: FOR J = 1 TO 10

: : PRINT I, J, I+J

: NEXT J

NEXT I

As I was trying to say, not all BASICs support colons as well as the leading space. A REM followed by leading space would work, but the problem there is debugging the code.

[Frozone212]

keaton that was AWESOME advice. Managed to code breakout with only one (fixed now) error. saved it and will work on it tomorrow. thank you everyone for your kind words.

[Keatah]

It's pretty much just how it was back then. Simpler tech (though we didn't see any limits at the time) made it so much easier to get the right mindset for learning the essential fundamentals of computing and electronics. Today I feel intro kits for like Arduino and R-Pi are big houses of cards. They rely on a ton of groundwork already having been done by someone else. And if something doesn't work right you'll not have learned anything about how fix it. I'm not impressed with junior turning a light on or off with a smartphone. Basically he'll have just paired a BT module with some pre-made kit - but learned nothing of how electricity works, let alone anything about any of the tech in his fone.

 

Back then if we wanted to adjust current or voltage we'd have to haul our asses down to RadioShack and buy resistors and transistors and build a circuit to actually do that. And going back even further you could make your own resistors with a wire-wound coil even. That impresses me. So once helicoptered hellspawn junior learns the fundamentals, then he can move into all these pre-made module kits.

 

Much of my learning was forward-learning. Meaning I had to start with the basics of like using knowledge chemistry to make a battery. Then use discrete "cat's whiskers" detector diode, a coil, a capacitor to make a crystal radio, then advance up to build an amplifier from more discrete parts. Backward learning is like dissection, building up an R-Pi kit, but having to disassemble parts of it to learn how everything works.

 

That's why I liked the Apple II at the time. Or rather enjoyed growing into it. The interpreted realtime BASIC was instantly understandable to a kid. And it wasn't far away from the hardware. Shit.. Nothing was back then. An assembly language prompt was but a command away. It took some work to draw a line, erase it, then move it. If you knew how muxes, gates, latches, and flip-a-flops worked you had a great advantage.

 

So.. Most of the concepts I learned on that machine have proven invaluable in many tech disciplines years and decades later.

[zzip]

The biggest motivation killer for me is there's too many platforms and I have too many ideas (that aren't fully formed).   I can never settle on an idea and platform.  The idea has to be good enough to keep me going and not hit a "well this isn't turning out to be as cool as I thought" wall and walk away from it.

 

In the 8-bit days,  whenever I had an idea, I'd start coding it up.  Only had Atari Basic and ASM so didn't have to worry about what language or platform is best.   Also what was a novel game/program in the early 80s is now old hat.    Anything worth exploring now is going to be more complex and not something I can churn out in an afternoon or two

[Keatah]

Some of what I thought was serious programming back in the day can be considered recreational programming today. Doing BBS mods and adding features was a big stink. The race was on to get new doors. Or any novel feature not present in the default release (of the bbs software).

 

It was magical to simply post and read messages on multiple sub-forums as it was. And we'd have room for maybe 5, with about 40 messages per. Having a spinning cursor and a clock card was elite. And having the ability to go from the message forum TO the file-transfer section (dropping to Cat-Send & Cat-Fur or the AE Line) was truly next generation stuff. And chatting with the sysop while a file transfer was happening would be right at home in Q's R&D lab - so futuristic is was.

 

All that sounds like primitive limitations. It was not. Sysops were at the very forefront of electronic telecommunications on micros.

 

And when we got bored we would frame important text with ASCII characters. Some of the banners were quite nice looking.

[-][-][-][-][-][-][-]

()()()()()()()()()()()

(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

\\\/// \\\/// \\\///

 

A tour'de'force feature I had going that no one else had was a thermometer. A simple circuit I plugged into the game port. It read the resistance of thermocouple and a few of lines of BASIC converted the value into C` or F`. Every user that signed on checked it. A remote weather station! Revolutionary!

 

I had other timewasters set up. Like diiagnostics that ran for 2 minutes. Or a disk catalog optimizer and verifier. And something that claimed to flash the room lights for 10 seconds. Or a siren to wake up the cat and a sensor to determine if it left its basketbed.

 

The weather station was real. The rest were fake consisting of only simple logic or text and a loop..

 

4000 REM FLASH THE ROOM LIGHTS

4010 PRINT "THE ROOM LIGHTS ARE FLASHING!"

4020 FOR I = 1 to 10000 : NEXT

4030 RETURN

 

4100 REM OPTIMIZE THE DISKS

4110 PRINT "THIS WILL TAKE SOME TIME."

4120 FOR I = 1 TO 30000: NEXT

4130 PRINT "THE LOG AND MESSAGE BASE HAS BEEN ALPHABETIZED, CATEGORIZED, AND ORGANIZED."

4140 RETURN

 

4400 REM WAKE THE CAT

4410 REM PROGRAM LOGIC HERE

4510 PRINT "THE CAT IS NOT HERE NOW."

4520 PRINT "SOUNDING THE ALARM!"

4530 PRINT "THE CAT IS UP AND MILLING ABOUT! IT LEFT THE ROOM!"

4600 RETURN

 

5000 REM LIGHT OR DARK?

5010 REM PROGRAM LOGIC HERE

5050 PRINT "IT IS LIGHT OUTSIDE."

5060 PRINT "IT IS DARK OUTSIDE." 

5100 RETURN

 

6000 REM DIAGNOSTICS

6010 PRINT "TESTING CPU" : GOSUB 6090

6020 PRINT "TESTING ROM" : GOSUB 6090

6030 PRINT "TESTING RAM" : GOSUB 6090

6040 PRINT "TESTING I/O CIRCUITRY" : GOSUB 6090

6050 PRINT "TESTING SOUND AND VIDEO" : GOSUB 6090

6060 PRINT "TESTING PERIPHERAL CARDS" : GOSUB 6090

6070 PRINT "TESTING POWER SUPPLY" : GOSUB 6090

6080 PRINT "TESTING MODEM AND PHONE LINE" : GOSUB 6090

6085 GOTO 6095

6090 FOR I = 1 TO 7000 : NEXT : RETURN

6095 PRINT "SYSTEM PASS!"

6100 RETURN

 

8000 REM SYSTEM EXPANSION STATUS

8010 PRINT "-=> CURRENT CONFIGURATION <=-"

8020 PRINT "SLOT 0 = MICROSOFT 16K RAMCARD"

8030 PRINT "SLOT 1 = ORANGE MICRO GRAPPLER PARALLEL CARD"

8040 PRINT "SLOT 2 = HAYES MICROMODEM II"

8050 PRINT "SLOT 3 = 80 COLUMN CARD"

8060 PRINT "SLOT 4 = RADIATION COUNTER"

8070 PRINT "SLOT 5 = EMPTY"

8080 PRINT "SLOT 6 = DISK II CONTROLLER"

8090 PRINT "SLOT 7 = TIME MASTER II H.O."

8100 RETURN

 

.. I would always have a fictional card in there somewhere. Sometimes even a routine to interact with it too. Things like a Muon Particle Counter, Atari Expansion, BigTrak Controller,  People would sit there and seemingly have fun repeatedly going through this stuff over and over again! I loved it! They loved it! It tied up the phone line. It gave me something to do when I skipped school.

Edited January 18, 2023 by Keatah

[jhd]

27 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Or a siren to wake up the cat and a sensor to determine if it left its basketbed.

 

This is so funny! You could easily implement something like that now, obviously combined with a webcam so we can watch the cat get annoyed... 

 

[zzip]

20 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Some of what I thought was serious programming back in the day can be considered recreational programming today. Doing BBS mods and adding features was a big stink. The race was on to get new doors. Or any novel feature not present in the default release (of the bbs software).

 

It was magical to simply post and read messages on multiple sub-forums as it was. And we'd have room for maybe 5, with about 40 messages per. Having a spinning cursor and a clock card was elite. And having the ability to go from the message forum TO the file-transfer section (dropping to Cat-Send & Cat-Fur or the AE Line) was truly next generation stuff. And chatting with the sysop while a file transfer was happening would be right at home in Q's R&D lab - so futuristic is was.

 

All that sounds like primitive limitations. It was not. Sysops were at the very forefront of electronic telecommunications on micros.

Wow, I almost forgot I wrote  my own BBS software package and had to deal with a lot of that stuff.    I went a bit nuts,  had this crazy idea that a real programmer neeeded to implement everything from scratch, and not call out to other software,  so I implemented my own XMODEM routine, at least the checksum version.   I intended to implement Xmodem CRC, Ymodem, Zmodem too,  but I couldn't figure out how the CRCs were calculated,  eventually I did end up calling an external module that could handle Ymodem & Zmodem for me,  felt kind of dirty but it was cool that it worked.

 

This was before I started my computer science degree and learned that calling existing software libraries was perfectly normal and routine and not a sign of weakness

 

[Keatah]

Indeed.

 

I now remember how comical it sometimes used to be. IIRC I started with an AE Line. Then moved into a real BBS. Tele-Cat or Networks II or Apple-NET. Something like that. And I so missed the file transfer function since the boards didn't have any file xfer protocols in them. I had to have an option where the user would page me to chat and request access to the AE Line. I'd then tell the caller to call back in exactly 40 seconds, and booted the AE Line for a warez trade.

 

I also remember the AE Line could be made to function like a BBS. We'd communicate, by uploading text files. Everybody could read everything. So messages posted tended to just focus on warez requests or requests to clear a drive in preparation for receiving a big-ass upload.

 

All this manual effort was fun though however. Led to interactions and oftentimes getting the inside scoop on who was breaking what disk next. Some were so high up and so elite! Untouchable gods of hacking and cracking.

[Bruce Tomlin]

On 1/18/2023 at 1:53 PM, Keatah said:

[-][-][-][-][-][-][-]

()()()()()()()()()()()

(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

\\\/// \\\/// \\\///

On the main BBS that I used back in the '80s, I recall that the "stylish" separator line was just: [-%-]

And one of the big memes was "k-words" like k-kool, k-rad... oh yeah and random in-caps like k-rAd

[Keatah]

Ooaahhhww K-Kalico-Kool.. man.. Loved that stuff!
 

I remember going from the II+ to the //e with its "enhanced" keyboard. The few extra symbols we got direct access to felt like moving up to a Cadillac - having had lived with the II keyboard for nearly 5 or 6 years already! Then came MouseText and ProTerm. But by that time I had shut down the BBS mostly.

[+OLD CS1]

18 hours ago, Bruce Tomlin said:

And one of the big memes was "k-words" like k-kool, k-rad... oh yeah and random in-caps like k-rAd

kewl

[potatohead]

On 1/14/2023 at 12:54 PM, Keatah said:

Just imagine how much of an adventure it was getting a memory upgrade from 48K to 64K!

I never had that experience on my Apple 2.  My own machine was a //e.  128k out the gate.  But, I did experience it on my Atari machine.  I had a 16K Atari 400 and going to 64K was awesome!  Could use the better graphics and double buffer!  Sweet!  And could run more games and such too.

 

On 1/14/2023 at 12:54 PM, Keatah said:

And for all the "size-grades" I had a RAMDISK program. It was I*N*C*R*E*D*I*B*L*E

I had a similar, but much smaller experience.  It was possible to make a little RAMDISK on the 800XL.  Was a Kb or two.  

 

Anything I did with it was super fast.  I used it to hold data for programs and test out data going to disk, etc...  Now today that is all normal and ordinary, but back then it was amazing!

 

On 1/20/2023 at 12:33 AM, Keatah said:

Then came MouseText

Yes!  The Apple having fixed characters made things like MouseText awesome upgrades!  And on many machines that did have user definable characters, the idea of making them able to represent dialogs, other basics was compelling.  

[potatohead]

On 1/17/2023 at 5:23 PM, Frozone212 said:

Managed to code breakout with only one (fixed now) error

Excellent!  Hopefully, doing that broke your "log jam" and you find your code flows freely.

 

 

[Frozone212]

funny story actually. The ball wasn't showing up so I changed a value hoping it would come down and...now it's on the left hand side. I also figured out how to run tape images on the 128.

[potatohead]

Nice!  I want a 128.  Enjoy!

[Frozone212]

2 hours ago, potatohead said:

Nice!  I want a 128.  Enjoy!

as do I, sadly I live in America. Normally that wouldn't be an issue but well, NTSC video and all that. There is no way in hell i'm buying a TS2068. That keyboard is just...no

[Keatah]

6 hours ago, potatohead said:

Yes!  The Apple having fixed characters made things like MouseText awesome upgrades!  And on many machines that did have user definable characters, the idea of making them able to represent dialogs, other basics was compelling.  

I'm surprised (now that the ? has come up, nopunintended) that no one, not then or now, made a "redefinable character module" that would plug into the Video ROM socket. Something with battery-backed SRAM or a EAROM or EEPROM. Something akin to a modern day Flash cartridge in a way. Where you could load in your own set of whatever characters you wanted.

 

I could also foresee games taking advantage of such an add-on. Though they'd obviously be in text mode and require the add-on. But it would be a cheap thing to make.

 

Also "disappointed" [a tiny bit] that games didn't do anything with MouseText either. I would have done something if I wasn't winding down my leisure activities on the //e. I was starting to eye the 16bit world and PC world not long after I got my Enhancement Kit. Though I did appreciate everything it had to offer.

 

[wierd_w]

That is also surprisingly something that got only the tiniest love on the PC, despite its graphics hardware supporting software provided fonts since nearly the beginning.

 

Everyone just used the rom fonts, and that was all, unless they had specific need otherwise.

[potatohead]

19 hours ago, Frozone212 said:

Normally that wouldn't be an issue but well, NTSC video

I got lucky and scored a PVM, low hour, displays anything world wide.  It has been fun viewing PAL gear, for example.  If you ever see a deal on one, you won't regret it.

[potatohead]

16 hours ago, Keatah said:

surprised (now that the ? has come up, nopunintended) that no one, not then or now, made a "redefinable character module" that would plug into the Video ROM socket.

You just gave me an interesting idea...

 

That hardware could be made today.  Basically, have a card plug into a slot and a cable that plugs into the video ROM socket.  The card can handle updating the "ROM" and now there can be fast HGR and DHGR graphics!  Useful from plain old Applesoft.

 

For an idea what that would be like, people could run faster CPUs and a character blitter.  Would not be quite the same, but darn close!

 

My FastChip is crazy when Applesoft is loaded into 16 Mhz fast RAM.  I have been working with the DELORES library that way and it works great!

 

Personally, I think more of us should be running faster CPUs.  Doing that really improves the machine.  But, I get it.  Some of us want to run at 1Mhz and push it that way.

 

The character card, let's call it, would make both camps happy.

 

And it would bring more of the world of character games, VIC-20 style, to the Apple!

 

The Apple is already a great bitmap gaming machine.  Even at 1Mhz, games like drol are strangely compelling!  6 colors is enough to do anything!

 

 

Edited January 22, 2023 by potatohead

[potatohead]

16 hours ago, Keatah said:

surprised (now that the ? has come up, nopunintended) that no one, not then or now, made a "redefinable character module" that would plug into the Video ROM socket.

And the way to make the most of the characters is to work with them in pairs!

 

Instead of 7x8, use 14x8.  That way, all the artifact colors line up which keeps the number of characters needed to do the intended screen lower.  Or, put another way, the intended screen can feature more elements per set of characters.

 

Either means less on the fly redefinition too.

 

Of course, none of it matters for programs intended for monochrome displays.

 

This would be a spiffy add on.

Edited January 23, 2023 by potatohead

[carlsson]

16 hours ago, Keatah said:

a "redefinable character module" that would plug into the Video ROM socket

For what it is worth, the pioneers at HAL Labs made such expansions for the Sharp MZ-80K (PCG-8000), NEC PC-8001 (PCG-8100, sometimes known as PCG-8001) and Commodore PET (PCG-6500). While Apple II also had some presence in Japan, it probably didn't have enough sales to warrant them to make an Apple version as well.

http://s-sasaji.ddo.jp/pccata/halpcg.htm

[broettger]

Motivation for any hobby comes from within.  If you have to ask for it or seek it from an external source, you are doomed to fail!

[Keatah]

Yes. Curiosity, exploration, discovery. All these motivate you and come from within. It's like lazy recreational programming. What happens if I change this or do that?