Attacking the 35$ (not) computah

On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:15:05 GMT) it happened snipped-for-privacy@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel) wrote in :

Took 400 Euro to register a charity. So that is 4 cent per unit worth of charity. LOL

On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:53:42 -0500) it happened DJ Delorie wrote in :

That was already clear to me, as you are a RatHead man.

Maybe you can shed light on how you will get the correct video synced frame rates:

On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:28:38 -0800) it happened Robert Baer wrote in :

Yep, there was also the Motorola maxboard (if I remember the name correctly). It was actually when some guys showed me that board when I decided to design my own video digitizer so we could send slowscan video via the UART.... Designed a 6 bit digitizer eurocard size, TLL, and it worked! Then somebody walked in and told me he did see an 8 bit 100% integrated flash converter chip. Things were going very fast then, a video frame store, with staggered RAM, for speed, was a major project, I asked (a charity) for funding, but the project was turned down. (It was supposed to be used to send live color pics via the transatlantic phone line).

25 years later I met Mr Director again, they were doing it with PC at a higher price then I had quoted, he looked at me and said: "You proposed that back then did not you?" I said: "Yes, you missed an opportunity" (to make a couple of million perhaps). Visions of where it goes. Was a gratifying moment for me,

On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:38:03 -0800) it happened Robert Baer wrote in :

I desigend a 5 1/4 inch floppy controller that could do that with the Intel floppy controller chip from the IBM PC. Except that mine was driven from a Z80. Some time ago I bought a USB floppy drive, so I could reflash my Tyan BIOS.....

Leroi Brown:

Figures. Why still post here? this was about computahs. Try the pills the doctor gave you, not the ones from the pub.

Were talking UHF channel 36 here. The UK has been transmitting TV on UHF since the mid 60's.

Dumbfuck.

The idea is that, with the ZX81 (and Commodore 64 and Apple II and other computers of that era), while it's true you didn't have the ASIC design files, every register was documented so that your ability to have the board do "cool things" was primarily limited by your own creativity rather than due to entirely artificial constraints (i.e., a lack of documentation). (Whereas, even if you had the ASIC design files, sure, maybe you could modify them to add features, but this is now effectively a new machine -- software you wrote to use those new features wouldn't have been compatible with the millions of unaltered machines out on the market already.)

Indeed, the software that was developed for these old 8-bit machines

*far* exceeded what the designers had initially ever envisioned for them; I say that's directly a result of an open architecture where all the registers are documented.

OK, that's fair enough. I'd like to see a disclaimer like that on their web page... (especially since I'd estimate it's far more than 0.01% who want to write hardware drivers, but of course this is pretty much impossible to know right now).

Hmm... when I first saw it my thought was definitely, "it'd be cool to figure out how this board works so as to best apply it."

For my desktop PC, no, but I very much DO have schematics and datasheets for the PC motherboards that are built into the instruments I design and sell.

I would grant you, though, that as you go from relatively simple devices like the RPi to more complex ones like a full-fledged PC motherboard, the need for detailed low-level documentation does become less necessary since the number of people who'll be programming at the lowest level becomes pretty small. So I suppose this is another reflection that my first thought about the RPi was that it was aimed at a somewhat lower-level audience than it apparently really is.

Um, yes, yes I do. :-) I do look at them on occasion...

Other than a few special pins the connector's pinout was just Z80 pins, so the Z80 manual would have had all the timing diagrams.

---Joel

Yo, Jan, do you even remember what that thing cost? I as a student back then could most definitely not afford either the ZX80 or the ZX81. Neither could anyone else I knew. This was for rich kids only. I still remember drooling all over an advertisement in a French paper, then seeing a fat four-digit Franc number at the end. Went over to Hema and bought myself a Cote-du-Rhone instead. That I could afford.

Nah. Get an older PC. Much better bang for the buck. In fact, it's not all that difficult to get one for free.

This is the 21st century, last time I looked. Both flat screens here have HDMI input. It avoids having to think about settings, something that might be asking too much of kids these days. With HDMI, you plug it in, and it worketh.

[...]

At what price?

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

My ZX81 (TS1000) cost $99, not including the 16k ram pack.

My first car cost $100.

I got them about the same time.

Times have changed...

No it wasn't - at least not in the UK. The SC/MP was about £40-50 as a kit and so was his scientific calculator before that. I think the ZX80 first launched at £100 and went up from there. I never got one because I already had an Acorn Atom which was only £20 more in kit form. It wasn't cheap but it wasn't unaffordable if you *really* wanted one.

The rich kids had Apples which were incredibly overpriced in the UK (and arguably still are: think US $1 - £1 GB). Those of us that knew how to make them do things got invited round and that was interesting.

Shouldn't it have been about FF 1000 in those days?

Indeed. There are secondhand boxes for £50 over here which is less than the cost of the XP OS license. The best second hand price performance in the UK is about £100 which is good enough to do video rendering.

For a very long time an IBM PC in the UK cost around £2000 and slowly improved in specification at or near constant price. Their comments about 640k of ram being enough for anybody sound rather silly now...

Almost any modern TV set has HDMI and digital works a lot better for sharp text than either VGA or yuk! UHF modulators.

Dunno but in the UK about £69.95 (he always priced like that). (so likely $99 at a guess)

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On a sunny day (Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:01:11 -0800) it happened Joerg wrote in :

Joerg, I do not remember the price, but it was not much. But I was no student anymore at that time, so my perspective of 'expensive' was different, I had my TV shop, and plenty of TVs to try it on, scope, all equipment you can imagine to investigate it, I remember writing a small program in that BASIC that printed repair bills, added a serial printer interface for that, and actually sold some of that soft.

That is not the point, from a kids learning point of view you can learn from the TTL circuit diagram how a real computer, plus the very clever video interface, worked, and even rebuild it from scratch. The very higly integrated chipsets of PeeSees these days would be a bit too much for most kids.

It really was not that much, the printer was much more expensive.

That would be clever. VGA wasn't invented until later. Hercules graphics and the good old 6847/6845 CGA was as good as it got back then. Beebon let you choose which four colours from a palette of 16? (I forget). IBM just had two different and equally naff colour schemes.

Japanese 9801 had the NEC7220 graphics coprocessor needed to support kanji fonts and way ahead of its time but too expensive for the West.

Only in third world VHF TV countries. UK was on UHF by then.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

In Europe it listed just under 3000 French Francs. Which was IIRC well over $500. Anyhow, way out of league for a student.

My first car (same time frame as the ZX80) was under $50.

I built my computational stuff out of TTL chips. Should have used CMOS in hindsight but that was even more expensive. On my first project I paid north of $20 for a 1kbit (yes, bit) SRAM. I'd liked to have two but that wasn't in the cards.

Not always for the better. But regarding electronics and computing the good old days are right now.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Apples were massively cloned in Germany and in the Netherlands. That made them somewhat affordable. But the real ticket was to get to the US and bring something back from there. If you were able to afford the ticket, that is.

IIRC it was a lot higher. Anyway, not within my budget. Which wasn't too bad because that meant I had to build my own hardware, and that was more educational than anything I learned about computing and digital at the university.

I paid around 10,000 Deutschmarks for my Tandon 386. This did not include the NEC MultiSync monitor which was another few thousand.

UHF modulators were only for the well-heeled. All I had was a drifty VHF-I modulator.

I'd have bought it instantly at that price back then. But ...

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

I even had a color TV in the early 80's because I rescued a Philips that someone had tossed to the curb and repaired it. However, I could only use it while nobody was cooking and the shower boiler was not heating up because the whole apartment back at my time in NL was fused at 6A. One circuit, that was it. Oh, and the HW100 ham radio transceiver had to be off as well. Too many tubes.

interface,

much for most kids.

Back then PCs were very simple. And much more versatile than a Sinclair. You could build your own interface cards. I bought a book "Top-Training for Turbo-Pascal" that even came with a Vero/Vector style ISA card.

Of course, to use it I had to beg time at other people's PCs or wait until I visited my parents because dad always had the latest and greatest computing stuff from IBM.

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:30:13 -0800) it happened Joerg wrote in :

I am not sure you got the time table right.

Lets check:

that was 1980.

IBM PC:

August 1981

I know this, because AFTER I did that program in BASIC one companion in my company wanted to buy an IBM, the IBM was +++++more expensive

After I sold the TV shop I went, after several other things, to work in the late eighties for a company where I just did that, ISA cards, I invented the wave table soundcard, suggested Boss patented it, he did not, an other missed opportunity, Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O we only used IBM, no clones, Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.

I remember one project that I did with that IBM PC got a lot of press and TV coverage, and caused a stir with IBM dealers as we 'bypassed' them and got the stuff directly from IBM, but were no official dealer, They came and my boss told them 'would you rather have that we did it with a clone?" LOL

BTW I still have a PC with one ISA slot, some PCI slots and floppy drive. I do not have those large ISA prototype cards anymore, but still a Philips ISA video PAL receiver card.

That was not the first personal computer fropm IBM. For example, we had this one (it's actually still there):

Mid 70's.

Not if one works at IBM and gets an employee discount :-)

Had that happen as well. Brainstorm meeting, the whole company. Theme: What else could we do with ultrasound? Only requirement was absolutely no laughing about ideas of others.

So I and a few other guys came up with an idea we thought was grandiose: The sonic toothbrush! Thundering laughter, people slapping their knees, falling off chairs. Needless to say, nothing came of this meeting. Five years later Philips started making oodles of money with ... a sonic toothbrush (we have them).

It had to and I predicted it (to IBM folks). Only open architectures can win in this market.

You can still buy all sorts of new PC with ISA, because of heavy industrial use. They are here to stay.

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

At the price, it was about as "personal" as a PDP-11. We had a bunch of them that we had a coop student build from the BOM, too. ;-)

Well, there is that. ;-) Mine, a 5150, one floppy, 48K (the minimum employee purchase), monochrome, and a CGA graphics card (no display) was about $2500.

The problem was that ISA couldn't win in IBMs market. As we saw with advent of PCI, later, they were right. The greater market wasn't ready for the integration of microchannel, though.

If you have enough money.

Not mine. Not HD.

market,

Read more carefully.