National SC/MP micro

The thing that looks like a used doormat? I'd fire anyone who did anything like that.

Kinda hilarious. It looks like one of those artists' version of a PC board.

Coders are threatened by AI. Circuit designers, not yet.

The ZX80 was a starting point fo me in starting my own business... I used to go to Woolworths and buy the kit for £30? put them together and sell them in my computer shop for £50.. Then on to all sorts with Vic20? Commodore 64, amstrad machines and all sorts of periferal add ons that I designed and built. Google Ram Electronics Music Mchine/Ram Turbo etc. Happy days, Made enough money to buy 2 factories outright, especiall after Sinclair went bust and we did a massive Xmas deal with Boots and Dixons to supply a joystick+ interface for all the old sell off stock.. :)

I work full-time plus.

I do expect any document, including a sketch or a whiteboard photo, to be clear and legible and have a visible title, author, and date, and to be reasonably named and archived.

We design stuff to manufacture and sell. May as well; it pays the bills.

The new high voltage GaN pulser is spectulative, but probably worth exploring. We do need to keep up with new parts and technology.

Crazy ideas pay off some times, and are fun to explore. Sometimes a dumb diversion winds up paying off years later.

At the time I hadn't left school yet. I avoided the ZX80/81 and moved on to

What I didn't immediately know was that it was a modified copy (without licensing) of the hardware and the Microsoft BASIC from

The document should be subservient to the ideas behind it. If any detail which is irelevant at that stage gets in the way of the thinking process, it is not serving its purpose. A back-of-an-envelope sketch is a perfectly valid way of putting an idea down on paper, the proper drawing with all the extra details can come later if it is justified.

Jan's drawings appear to be reminders to himself about what he did when he made a particular piece of equipment; as such, they are adequate. I would rather he showed them to us in that format than waste hours re-drawing them or simply decide it is too much trouble and not show them to us at all.

For a hobbyist working alone, sure, he can do anything he enjoys. But his scribbles are illegible to others.

It wouldn't take hours for him to sharpen pencils and put a title and a date on a schematic, so other people could understand them.

This scribbled idea is 10 years old.

My first computer was a Leading Edge 386SX with 1 meg of RAM, later upgraded to 2, clocked at 16 MHz.

It cost $1000 in circa 1990 dollars including a VGA monitor, what a deal!

It served well into the early 2000s as an email/AOL machine for my late father after I'd moved on to more modern desktops

My first computer was a Leading Edge 386SX with 1 meg of RAM, later upgraded to 2, clocked at 16 MHz.

It cost $1000 in circa 1990 dollars including a VGA monitor, what a deal!

It served well into the early 2000s as an email/AOL machine for my late father after I'd moved on to more modern desktops

Variable names could have more than two characters but only the first two characters were used. I found out that numeric variables occupied 6 bytes. Two for the name and 4 for the "packed" value. so IFAB=BCTHEN... would use BC as the variable name and successfully tokenize THEN. IFAB=BCDTHEN... would ignore D but D would still be stored and listed. IF AB=BCDEFTHEN would cause a syntax error because DEF is a reserved word. IFAB=TOTHEN would also generate syntax error because TO is reserved.

Might be better to just offer it for sale to anyone who might want it.

No PEEK or POKE? Not sure I could cope with that :) I wrote an extension for a Gates BASIC so the program could modify itself. This would allow program lines to be inserted and deleted while executing from other lines. Very dangerous I know but one reason I did this was because the BASICs didn't have a means to evaluate and arbitrary expression in a string. So I did that by making it able to add/change a line in the program as something like 100 X=<expression>

The Gates BASICs I used had only one numeric type. I think it was safe to assume integer if you kept to integers below a specific number (possibly +/- 8388608) but I can't remember any other details.

One reason for avoiding spaces at the time was that although I don't recall writing a program which wouldn't fit in 8K I do remember running out of data space. I subsequently learned to use spaces, particularly when advanced concepts such as lower case were also allowed :)

The first IBM PC I encountered was in 1981 with twin floppys and 16kb ram (quickly upgraded to 64kb). My supervisor got one of the first available in the UK (Fortran compiler & Flight simulator to go with it). It was *very* different from the IBM mainframe experience. The first thing I wrote for it was a terminal emulator to access our source code.

My first home *PC* was an Epson NEC V30 CPU with monochrome Hercules graphics 640x480, 512MB ram and a whopping 10MB hard disk £1k in 1985. I soon had to add a extra 20MB HD in one of the ISA slots.

Our works PCs were 1024x1024 NEC 7220 graphics, IEEE488, IBM XT or AT at about the same time costing about £2k5 each (half that on the graphics card and colour display). It did 16 colours at that resolution. There was an optional upgrade available to 256 colours for $$$$ - I can't recall any customer taking that option after seeing the price.

Prior to that Olivetti M20's using the ill fated Captain Zilog Z8000 and a weird dialect of their own Basic.

I prefer to stagger my purchases alternating between desktop replacement and portable laptop (although I abuse my laptops so much that they often end up not having much battery life for working on the move). Thankfully most long distance transportation these days provides power.

My upgrade heuristic was to replace each time a new machine would be 3x faster than its predecessor at the sort of CPU intensive tasks I do.