BBC Micro, Acorn Atom, Commadore PET. all kinds of home computer. So prime retro material late 70s early 80s. There's a CP/M port. So you can use PIP which traces it's lineage back to the DEC Tops-10 operating system if not beforehand (its a peripheral IO command model, although I think CP/M PIP only shares name)
Add a DIN plug and record programs in Kansas City Standard on a cassette recorder. Could be a walkman. A floppy (full 8" type) was a luxury. Almost a megabyte! imagine what you can do.. when a program is the amount of text you can fit in the VBI of a ceefax/teletext broadcast, or is typed in by hand in hex. Kansas city standard is 300 bits/second and the tape plays in real-time so a standard C60 is like 160kb on both sides if you were lucky: it misread and miswrote a LOT.
I used to do tabular GOTO jump table text adventures, and use XOR screen line drawing to do moving moire pattern interference fringes. "mod scene" trippy graphics!
Thats a mandelbrot in ASCII, the best I've seen, on the web page. Super stuff.
People wrote tiny languages for the 6502. integer only but C like syntax, or Pascal or ALGOL. People did real science in BASIC, a one weekend course got you what you needed to do some maths for a Masters or PHD in some non CS field.
My friends did a lot more of this than me. Because I had access to a Dec-10 and a PDP-11 at work and later Vax/VMS and BSD UNIX systems, I didn't see the point of home machines. A wave I wish I'd ridden but not seeing the future emerge has been a constant failure of mine.
I wrote (mostly copied from printed code and altered) games in BASIC. Too bad I had not enough understanding what could have been done in the assembly language... Now I keep rediscovering them, but it's only for the sake of nostalgia (and personal development)
The 6502 is the best 8bit CPU for learning stuff. There's a lot you could add to it, but there is very little could take away. It's minimal but you have everything you need.
BBC Micro, Acorn Atom, Commadore PET. all kinds of home computer. So prime retro material late 70s early 80s. There's a CP/M port. So you can use PIP which traces it's lineage back to the DEC Tops-10 operating system if not beforehand (its a peripheral IO command model, although I think CP/M PIP only shares name)
Add a DIN plug and record programs in Kansas City Standard on a cassette recorder. Could be a walkman. A floppy (full 8" type) was a luxury. Almost a megabyte! imagine what you can do.. when a program is the amount of text you can fit in the VBI of a ceefax/teletext broadcast, or is typed in by hand in hex. Kansas city standard is 300 bits/second and the tape plays in real-time so a standard C60 is like 160kb on both sides if you were lucky: it misread and miswrote a LOT.
I used to do tabular GOTO jump table text adventures, and use XOR screen line drawing to do moving moire pattern interference fringes. "mod scene" trippy graphics!
Thats a mandelbrot in ASCII, the best I've seen, on the web page. Super stuff.
People wrote tiny languages for the 6502. integer only but C like syntax, or Pascal or ALGOL. People did real science in BASIC, a one weekend course got you what you needed to do some maths for a Masters or PHD in some non CS field.
My friends did a lot more of this than me. Because I had access to a Dec-10 and a PDP-11 at work and later Vax/VMS and BSD UNIX systems, I didn't see the point of home machines. A wave I wish I'd ridden but not seeing the future emerge has been a constant failure of mine.
I wrote (mostly copied from printed code and altered) games in BASIC. Too bad I had not enough understanding what could have been done in the assembly language... Now I keep rediscovering them, but it's only for the sake of nostalgia (and personal development)
The 6502 is the best 8bit CPU for learning stuff. There's a lot you could add to it, but there is very little could take away. It's minimal but you have everything you need.