Solder rot

[dennis]

I don't see how you would stop it, unless it has some sort of programmable logic on it.

[John Rumm]

well most of us learned with kit of comparable sophistication, and look at us now ;-)

[Huge]

Good point.

Although the first computer I owned was a SPARCstation 1+.

[brass monkey]

I was crazy enough to build a Nascom 1 on vero DIP prototyping boards in a home-made cardframe and wire-wrapped 43-way conns. :D Crazy covers it.

[John Rumm]

I toyed with the idea of building a Micro Tan S100 bus system after having reached the limits of what you could do with a ZX80... then the VIC-20 was announced and I decided to wait for that!

[brass monkey]

I wish I now had a fraction of the interest I had then. Z80 and CP/M, 70k floppies, assembly language, counting machine cycles in interrupt service routines, writing disk primitives, getting a golfball from British Gas, modifying it and writing drivers etc. I think being a tightarse taught me a lot, why would I buy stuff when I can make it myself? LOL These days, computing to me means playing hearts or solitaire but my original interest came from using a PDP-9 to play Startrek on a 110 baud gatling gun (Teletype 33).

[brass monkey]

Memories eh? When everyone and his dog knew that 3E 77 meant LD A,77H

21 nn nn meant LD HL, nnnn and 20H was a space and you knew this stuff in hex, octal and binary. I think I need to sort things out for my demise. 4A 75 73 74 20 54 6F 6F 20 6F 6C 64

[D.M. Procida]

It depends what you want it for!

So far, my children have learned all kinds of things, including how to solder and test a circuit, how to debug hardware and software, patience, Forth, RPN, the concept of memory locations, bitmaps, etc etc.

And all they thought they were doing is having fun.

Of course you can learn all this in other ways. You don't need to buy a kit computer based on outdated technology to do it.

But, learning most of those things via what people like to call a learning platform is just like more school, where everything is done in a little educational sandbox, and too safe and ready-made, like almost everything else that is aimed at children nowadays.

Daniele

[Huge]

Jolly good point.

[grimly4]

Hex for 'bury me with my bootloaders on'?

[Terry Casey]

[grimly4]

[Terry Casey]

44 6f 6e 27 74 20 6d 65 6e 74 69 6f 6e 20 69 74 2e

As it happens, I'm giving a local group a talk on DSO later in the month

- DSO here is in April.

With the time available, I thought I'd lighten things up by starting with a quick look back through the history of broadcasting over the last hundred years, starting with the days when the wireless was digital in April 1912 ...

CQD CQD DE MGY etc ...

Then continuing with "but Morse Code was never going to be the basis of a successful entertainment medium ..."

I think the same could be said for hex ...!

[grimly4]

If it was sent and decoded very fast, it could be used to drive a mechanical device that drew pictures in quick succession. Victorian telly...

[Andrew]

Well I hate to disagree. In the early 90's I did the software for an analogue addressable fire alarm that used a z80 on its main board. I used an australian 'C' cross compiler called Hitech and it generated pretty good code, on the whole, and used those registers a lot. Certainly a lot easier than the loop controllers running the actual call points and other addressable devices. These used a cheap 8051 variant and I had to use a low-cost assembler from somewhere that I forget. The decision to use the Z80 was because it was cheap and the company was still hand-soldering so surface-mount was out of the question.

Andrew