P3D Re: Back from the DDDead! -Part IV

[Bob Wier <wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Ha!  Call *that* pioneering?  I assembled my first personal computer in
>1979.  It was an S100-bus based Z80 machine running at 4 (yes, four!)

Ha! Call *that* pioneering? I built *my* first computer from
a kit in 1976 - one of the Don Lancaster designs - the SWTPCO
(Southwest Technical Products) kit based on the Motorola 6800.
It came with a big 256 bytes of memory (not 256K - 256). I never
thought I'd need more, but less than 6 months later I sprang for
a 4K byte memory board which ran, I think, around $500 or so.
By then someone has written an assembler, and I needed that
enormous amount of memory. 

It was quite a different design than the Altair - there were
no lights or switches on the front panel (cost too much to put
'em there). It was solely designed to run from a terminal
unit (I built a SWTPCO CT-1024 "TV Typewriter" for that) - the
only unfortunate thing was that the "reset" button and "power"
button were side by side - if you hit the wrong one, diasaster!
You'd have to enter the machine language in again via the 
MIKSBUG monitor. I did some artifical intelligence experiments
with that machine plus some at school, which were in an article
in, I think, issue #3 of BYTE magazine.

'Scuze me - I gotta go find my teeth on the nightstand ;-)

                   Bob Wier
       mailto:wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
   10:30 PM Wednesday, February 17, 1999
        Unix/Internet Administrator
   Rocky Mountain College, Billings MT.
 keeper of the Photo-3d and Overland-Trails
mailing lists and the USA GPS Waypoint server



------------------------------