Hackaday has an article on Home computing in 80's Czechoslovakia.
My hobbies were electronics and – in the middle of 80s – computers. The history of computers behind the Iron Curtain is very interesting, with a lot of unusual moments. For example – communists at first called cybernetics as “bourgeois’ pseudoscience” (as well as sociology or semiotics), “used to enslave a mankind by machines”. But later on they understood the importance of computers, primarily for science and army. So in 50s the Eastern Bloc started to build its own computers, separately and “in its own way.”
As a Soviet satellite state, part of the former Eastern Bloc, then the personal history of 80's computing presented in this article is a fascinating insight for those of us that grew up in the "parallel" scene in the west.
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Hackaday has an article on computer peripherals from former Soviet Union countries used in 80's era home computing.
... the lack of spare parts, literature and technology in Czechoslovakia forced geeks to solve it themselves: by improvisation and what we would today call “hacking.” Hobbyist projects of one person or a small party was eventually taken over by a state-owned enterprise, which then began to manufacture and deliver to stores with some minor modifications. These projects most often involved a variety of peripherals that could only be found in the Czechoslovakia with great difficulty.
This is a followup piece to an earlier article on home computers, originally discussed in a previous SN article.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @08:20PM
Was a Radio Shack TRS-80. It had a whopping 4k Ram and a tape recorder to save/load "basic" programs.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 16 2014, @08:47PM
Was a Radio Shack TRS-80. It had a whopping 4k Ram and a tape recorder to save/load "basic" programs.
Model I with the bouncy keyboard and level 1 basic. I had the 16k model III with level 2 basic in '81. That was the "all in one console" Oddly the cassette tape is still faster loading than most current day video game console startup sequences. Around '84 or so, got the first 300 baud modem radio shack sold, and the $15/hr or whatever it was Compuserv account. Don't remember my CIS ID other than 72...numbers comma more numbers.
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Tuesday December 16 2014, @10:01PM
I came into it later, Atari 800xl - just as it hit the market. sadly i went months without a cassette drive. then quickly upgraded to disk.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @10:22PM
I'll see you and raise you, installed my own RS-232C board to connect the 300 baud modem to on my Model III. Instead of CompuServe I dialed up Phoenix/Chandler area BBSes. *Plus* because I didn't have the money, I copypasta'd and tweaked the Assembler example Terminal program in the Programming Manual and used that for communications. (Remembering how cool it was when I figured out how to change the cursor to the diamond character...)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:32AM
IMSAI 8080 here. I do not know if it trumps anything.
I had to write my own OS and build my own cassette interface ( Manchester encoding; I had tri-state 8T97 chips directly driving the head, and I remember National LM382 chips to get the data back off the head and get it to enough amplitude to drive the Signetics 8T20 chip I was using as the front end of my decoder). All bit-bang. In hand-assembled machine code. It was some time before I even had a primitive assembler. Dr. Dobb's "Tiny Basic" was the first high level language it ran. It fit in one 2716 2Kx8 EPROM. I loved those 2716's... those were the first I had that did not require multiple power supplies to run them. Those 1702's I had required a 105 volt DC supply to program them.
I knew CP/M was out there, but I did not have enough money at the time for the Seagate drive. I finally landed some eight-inch Calcomp 100 drives a few years later, but by that time the whole shebang was obsolete and no longer worth spending that much effort when I could just go buy a Commodore64 off the shelf which used more standardized parts; mine was definitely a one-of-a-kind.
It was a lot of fun getting that thing to work. Downright exasperating at times.
At one time, I felt I knew everything there was to be known about a microcomputer, today, I don't even know how to keep the malware out. All I feel I can do is grouse at Microsoft for doing things completely differently than I would have done it. Not to say my way was any more right, but I do not understand the new stuff, and I fear what I do not understand.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday December 17 2014, @06:28AM
Yeah I don't think anybody is gonna top that as far as home computers go. I got to play with one in the late 70s but since it "fell of a truck" and didn't have any manuals there wasn't anything we could really do with the thing.
The first PCs where I got to actually write programs and use the thing were the VIC20 (Thanks Shatner, you and your TJ Hooker hair sold my parents on it!) along with Trash 80 my dad picked up to do accounting on. I ended up having to write a basic accounting program for it and ended up being the "computer guy" for pretty much every construction related business in the area. I probably should have went into programming, probably could have made a lot more money...but what can I say, I was playing rock star in bands playing all over the region at the time and when you are in your late teens and have women 10 to 15 years older than you treating you like a piece of candy and telling you how wonderful you are? The future is the LAST thing on your mind!
Still its no wonder so many from that period ended up making good money as programmers, you really needed to understand how to squeeze every bit of performance out of the code you wrote then.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday December 17 2014, @08:36AM
Yup.... memory was so expensive back then, and not only that, EPROM was really cheap compared to the magnetic storage of the day.
I remember all too well trying like the dickens to get every last byte used in the 2716 that held my primitive OS. I had two "videorams", which were each 16 lines of 64 characters ( 1K RAM ). My primitive OS used one of them, while the target program used the other. "Glass teletypes". If the target bombed, at least it left a trail on its still working monitor.
I learned pretty quickly to tie the two master clock signals that generated the RS-170 from one source, as otherwise the two monitors when placed alongside each other would jiggle so bad you couldn't read a thing. Or at least mine did. Olson electronics specials. Remember them? Olson electronics had all sorts of nifty junk, and I do mean junk. It wasn't good for anything else, but I had a helluva time taking the stuff apart. They sold all sorts of pieces of stuff cheap.
I guess the biggest hack I had with it is I discovered some strange tones on the local FM radio station's SCA subcarrier ( 67 KHz ) and discovered it was frequency shift keying ( seen by oscilloscope, lissajous patterns, sinewave generator ). I built a PLL with a 565 chip to lock onto those frequencies which let me see the original serial signal, which by observation on the oscilloscope to discover the baud rate. I then programmed the IMSAI's UART to receive at that frequency and lo and behold, it began displaying stock market information on the screen...
I would love to find out where those high paying jobs for the 60's nerds went... I used to work aerospace but got laid off when the Soviet threat went away. I looked around for a while but got so much discouragement from how much competition I had from other analog guys also laid off ( a helluva lot of really good guys ). I was so wrapped up in control systems, motor control, and refrigeration. So damm specialized that few people wanted to talk to me, and I could never seem to get past the well-dressed personnel screening people that I could not even begin to have a decent technical talk with. They would have a checklist over which software I was familiar with and if I did not check all the boxes, they moved on. Seems the biggest mistake I made while at work is I did not socialize much... I was too busy building my stuff.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:37PM
Man I wish I could build from scratch like you, I'm doing okay being a PC fixit guy and building and setting up HTPCs but I could be making more scratch if I had your skillset, you just gotta know where the money is at.
But it sounds like you may be having a hard time finding work, if so let old hairy lay something on you, one word....footpedals. Guitarists are ALWAYS looking for something that will set them off from the crowd and boutique hand built stompboxes? Go for crazy money, we are talking $100+ to over $400 and you are looking at MAYBE $30 worth of parts if that. If you want an idea to get ya started old Hairy can help ya out there too as there are several pedals that would be better if you slapped a parametric EQ with a toggle to switch the EQ to before or after the effect, tremolo/vibrato, chorus, autowah, hell even distortion sounds better with a parametric EQ to tweak the tone and what do those little stacked shaft pots go for these days, something like 85c a pop? Oh and be sure to build some bass ones as bass players don't get hardly any love and therefor is a HUGE untapped market! I'm telling ya there is serious $$$ to be made there and nobody gives a rat's ass about your age, you can be the "wise old sage" and would probably sell more with that image.
Anyway if you do go for it and start making the scratch I sure wouldn't object to a bass pedal as a thank you ;-)
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday December 18 2014, @05:41AM
Hairyfeet - it would be damned hard for me to build from scratch today anything resembling a modern machine.
Although I really appreciate your kind words, in all reality, what I had was roughly equivalent to today's Arduino.
Except there was a lot more tedious wiring involved, and physically, it was a lot bigger.
And, for what its worth, even today, I build custom Arduino-compatible things for embedded applications. All based on the ATMEL 328. The only thing that makes it special is the "optiboot" bootloader, [google.com] which is quite easily programmed into the ATMEL ... matter of fact the code is out there which turns just about any arduino-compatible into a bootloader programmer, so once you run the program on one Arduino, that Arduino will program the bootloader into other ATMEL chips, which then makes them respond as an Arduino UNO. I did not write any of this code, as there were some folks before me which did an excellent job of it.
I am totally sold on the Arduino concept. What I used to do with the IMSAI ( which was about two cubic feet, 20 pounds, and a good 200 watts to power everything ) got shrunk to a 28-pin DIP part. This part appears to have a rough throughput of almost two orders of magnitude over my IMSAI, while consuming several orders of magnitude less power. ( The IMSAI's 4Kx8 RAM boards used 32 2102 1Kx1 static ram and drew about an amp per board. I had eight of them. - the remaining 32K of memory space was taken up with two videoram boards with the rest used as 2716 ( 15 sockets available - as I tried to fit each application in multiples of 2K ).
It is kinda an unfair comparison as the ATMEL has 32K of EEPROM but only 2K of RAM - but then the ATMEL has all sorts of on-chip peripherals and the I2C bus makes it so much simpler to add yet more. The ATMEL's RISC instruction set is so much more elegant than the early 8080 set, which often required several clock cycles to execute an instruction.
I would dare say the IMSAI provided me hours of "entertainment" every day for several years. But I never liked TV much so it was the substitute for TV.
Your suggestion for doing audio work sounds fascinating... I have never worked that much in the music industry and I would have to have the musician work with me a lot to guide me into what he wanted. The closest I have come to musicians was helping in my church by resoldering connectors when the cable broke or doing the lights and sound board. The idea of doing filters or synthesizers are quite interesting, as often an unusual sounding device is what makes a piece of music stand out from the rest. That seemed to get started in the 60's as a lot of those old pieces of music had their instruments tweaked to make unusual harmonics. I remember that old Moog synthesizer. The stomp boxes look do-able if I knew what the musician was after, as it would likely communicate wirelessly back to a patch bay to switch back and forth between several configurations preset by the musician. Somehow I am envisioning some sort of stomp box that would emit different colors to tell the musician which configuration is in play, as it would take too long to recognize a numerical feedback. ( besides he might not have his glasses on... all the musicians I knew played by feel, much like a typist, and never really needed to see the instrument they were playing... rather they played it knowing exactly where all the control points were.)
Note: I am prone to bark up the wrong tree. Been there, done that, while the possum was a mile away...shaking its head.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:08PM
Was a Radio Shack TRS-80. It had a whopping 4k Ram and a tape recorder to save/load "basic" programs.
I remember those. Well, sort of; I had the TRS-80 CoCo 1, which still had the tape recorder and BASIC 1.0. Good for many frustrating memories of having to retype lines completely because it didn't backspace. Followed later by a Commodore 128, which seemed absolutely amazing in comparison.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday December 16 2014, @08:55PM
PMI-80 looks like it was inspired by Heathkit H-8, minus the S-100 bus. I had a H-8 after it was a little obsolete for fooling around with. They could be upgraded with a Z80 CPU board and it really warped my brain hand entering Z80 opcodes in OCTAL after all that time doing Z80 assembler in HEX. The UI does, as the article states, look like a KIM-1, but thats kind of like saying windows 8 and OSX are the same because they both run on laptops.
From memory the 8080 machine language made sense in octal, in a weird way, although Z80 code often didnt. Didn't make as much sense as PDP-8 machine language made in octal of course. The -8 was a joy to program in raw machine language.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:06PM
Wikipedia says the H-8 used a 50-pin bus, not S-100.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Buck Feta on Tuesday December 16 2014, @10:56PM
So I'm guessing WiFi probably wouldn't work through an iron curtain.
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:12AM
As THIS is what should be on a fricking tech site, a story involving ACTUAL TECH! Yes thank you FSM, actual geeky PC goodness! So before I look at TFA let me guess...lots of Z80 clones, Motorola 68k clones, maybe some Commodore ripoff and BBC clones as well? I have noticed in a lot of third world countries X86 never took off like it did here, probably because of how easy it was to crank off the Z80 and 68k chips. And I can't believe how long some of these chips have lasted, you often find 68ks and Z80s in those little MP3/MP4 players to this very day and the fact that there are still uses for these 40 plus year old chips is something I find fascinating.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.