[Xastir] The ultimate editor...

[Eric K Germann]

Almost as bad, we did programming on a similar Z80 setup in college.
Debugging was fun.  They were stored in a closet over a chem lab so the
edge connectors for the boards were (sometimes) corroded in subtle ways.
 No one realized it until it was too late ...

So debugging consisted of load code, run, if it locked up, pull the
board and clean with pencil eraser, reinsert, reload code and repeat.

Never was so happy to see a dumb terminal (upgrade 1) and punched tape
reader (upgrade 2) in my life.  By the end of the quarter we were so
happy to be punching in hex on a VT102 terminal.  Our final project for
that "intro" to microprocessors course was to write a sequencer to mimic
the turn signals on a '65 Thunderbird.  We chuckled because the turn
signals were older than we were ...

Went back to a PC and MASM was utterly wonderful at that point (and I'm
not that old) ...

Now the kids would want the turn signal to interface to Twitter (I'm
turning left ... ) with GPS coordinates ...

EKG
N1ICS

Curt, WE7U wrote:

> I started out w/o hard drives, w/o floppies, w/o tape drives.
> Programs disappeared if you shut off the computer.  Input was 8
> toggle switches (one byte wide) and a pushbutton, plus a few mode
> switches.  Put it in load mode, start flipping toggles in binary and
> then push the pushbutton.  Make a mistake, start over.
> 
> The entire memory was 256 bytes.
> 
> Output was two LED hexadecimal displays.
> 
> I still have it somewhere.  I should frame it.  Or let my kids try
> it.
>