While this definitely does not compare this experience, it did show this young person the utility; in the early 70s when Disney World opened, we used the trams in Fort Wilderness to get around for a week; shopping and back and forth to the camp store, going to the activities in the day, evening and at night. Just running around. Did this all with and without parents, and I think they were possibly electric at that time as they stopped right outside your campsite at the corner and must have been very quiet, or maybe diesel, just don't recall. We simply learned the schedule, hopped on and then off, and simply had a great time. Like many things Disney, I thought I was looking at the future and was pleased.
Loved my Vizio 60 until the backlights died; a known bad power supply engineering issue caused them to fail early. I have to wonder, though, why? Its not like led engineering isnt a solved problem. I'll leave that for someone else's discussion.
I like my HiSense 65 Android TV, and used to love it before the app providers started screwing with app updates (Netflix! Prime!). And the audio data stream/output conversion could do a little better to my home theater, but its fast enough, have bluetooth keyboard for quick searches/data entry. I think it is stupid that I cannot easily find a no-cost, dumb, Android photo screen saver for it (I think it ostensibly would rob from some Android app developer/Google Photos/Google Home). But it appears I can side load stuff, but I like to keep things clean. Anyhow, my original 60 Vizio was great, but died early b/c of known bad engineering of backlight power supply. But I like this even better.
These guys cannot leave money on the table; during the Sony vs Universal Studios, the Betamax lawsuit period, Hollywood said theirs "... is a premium product." They will never stop until every dollar is squeezed out of the public.
You are spot on, was there. The Ataris and ostensibly the Timex/Sinclair's were doing graphics from the very beginning, with their built in BASICs; typing in programs from the popular magazines. The Atari MAC/65 assembler came in 1982; the cartridge in 1984. Manx C in 1986 for Amiga. My school taught BASIC from "Micro-Soft" on an Altair. I went directly to doing bit level ops on Burroughs mainframes directly afterwards. And I still have all my Lattice C software for my Amiga circa 1990.
By the way, the original Atari models, the 400 and 800, did not have BASIC built in. (They may have been bundled with the BASIC cart, I don’t know.) Subsequent models had it built in.
Dak, in the days of dot matrix printers, marketed a horrible one in the computer mags that I simply had to have but now don't remember why. It used glass ampules filled with carbon as a print head, and a high voltage arc? to drag it to the page. It did work though, and I used it for my Atari systems at the time. Simply an odd product.
Sounds like the TRS-80 Screen Printer. A roll of aluminized paper was bent into an arc around a spinning drum with high-voltage wipers. Voltage pulses on the wipers would burn away the aluminum, revealing the dark background paper. Very fast, very strange.
Weird. 4 inches wide. Printed the contents of the screen and nothing else. Connected directly to the bus by an edge connector (no card or serial or parallel connection).
I got a Cox Red Baron in 1972, as I recall. Sad because I lived right next to a huge school yard but was never able to get it started. I had no one to ask how and why these things worked. It sat in the box on a shelf for the longest time.
The Heathkit/Zenith ET-3400 trainers with 6800s, and the accompanying Heath/Zenith coursework, were fantastic in 1982. 50+ of us completed it that year, the class final was bit-banging the tune of "Anchors Away" as the instructor was a Navy officer and educator, retired to civilian teaching. I later learned machine language on broken superscalar mainframes as bit-chaser, but the 6800 were simply fantastic devices and prepared me well. Flat, shared memory, von Neumann architecture. Very nice op codes and indexing, as I recall. Ill have to go back to my coursework and reminisce...
I have an ET-3400 on the shelf behind me! I was just playing with it the other day.
After watching Jason Turner's CppCon talk on writing an i386 to 6502 assembly translator [1][2], I started working on a fork that would target the 6800. I only got about 3 instructions working, but that's really all you need for some really simple test code with optimization turned to the max. It also turns out that someone wrote a fantastic emulator specifically for the ET-3400 trainer [3], and I managed to get my application running on it!
There is something special to me about the idea of writing modern C++, and compiling it for such early microprocessors. The 512 bytes of RAM is a pretty big limitation though. I wanted to try and emulate an EEPROM using an Arduino or FPGA, but got stalled out on the project. From time to time I like to browse through the LLVM backend documentation, but I can't seem to commit to trying to build a backend.
I recall; miniature incandescent bulbs embedded into push switches that could display/set registers, it was very important to test the bulbs before trusting them (a long press) else a burned out bulb may catch you off guard. Right next to the core memory cabinet, someone accurately patched it to show huge "$" during idle time!!
