[OT] Re: About programing, a general question

[NoOp]

On 12/17/2010 02:48 PM, Joep L. Blom wrote:
...
> I wonder of others from the "oldies" on this list has reminiscences of 
> that language.
> Joep

No. But I learned Benton Harbor BASIC (circa 1977) on this:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/heath/ad78a.jpg
[note the price: for me that was $1,400 as I had to have it shipped to
Japan where I was living at the time (1977 dollars & in todays dollars
is around $4,960 based on the 2009 CPI more if you use other indexes): I
eventually upgraded to 32K of RAM & that cost considerably more] and was
still using my H8 in 1998. Finally gave the whole system away (all
pristine condition & working - including cassette drive, H9 Terminal,
manuals, and original software sometime around 2000.
Wish I would have kept it now.)

Had a heck of a time explaining to my instructor at the University of
Maryland (yes, we had satellite courses even then) that my BH Basic
could do serial I/O with the hardware access statements. See:
<http://home.comcast.net/~davidwallace2000/h8/project8080_archive/pgs/basic.html>

Here's the assembly manual for the H8:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/heath/h8_asm.pdf

I after dabbling with BH BASIC, Fortran & Cobol, I went the other
direction from others in this thread and instead concentrated on
assembly language (HASL-8 2 pass assembler was what I used to learn),
and then Varian Minicomputer Microcode (hence: NoOp).

Note: TRS/Trash-80's were for wimps in our circle & paddle keys
sucked... Octal keypads ruled... until we discovered that Hex became the
defacto standard :-(

Seems like we always seem to have an OT reminiscence of this around this
time of year... :-)