Very cool - I also love the analogies of "this is what real 2400 baud would be like".. then 19.2K and finally 115kbaud. I spent so much time with baud rates running a BBS from 86-94 that all of these numbers resonate with me.. (my first modem was 300 baud..) Thanks Dave!
whats sad is I remember them all and even could understand almost all of the sounds made by the old modems including what connection rate was settled on by variances in the sound.. where my wife just looked at me when she learned that and gave me a look as if to say "Bloody hell u know that but you cant remember peoples names????" my 1st modem I owned was a 110 baud btw.. and the BBS days.. ahh soo long ago.. so much of my work got distribed that way along with Fidonet of course and traced way back to long before BBS's really existed.. but damn now i'm really datin myself @_@
Your timeline and mine are pretty much identical. Bought my first Commodore in 1985...went online BBSing in 1986. Nearly went broke with GEnie. Purchased my first clone in 1995. Made my first internet pen pals in 1996. First website in 1998.
@@kindanyume I was a Commodore guy. We had a computer club here called OCCUG. Occasional Calhoun County User Group. Commodore, IBM, and Apple snob guys. The biggie IBM guy was retired from a very large gubment weapons depot where he ran the computer operation. Climate controlled room, the works. He told me quite confidently that back in the day they had 30 megs.... Count 'em. THIRTY megs of storage. Who could EVER need more than that?!...he finished.
Funny! I still use MS Quick Basic for aircraft and missile simulations and provide video to demonstrate all sorts of characteristics to my classes in flight mechanics and orbital mechanics. It drives my students nuts and the questions never end. I like it!
I have a KIM-1 replica called the PAL-1. From the software point of view it is 100% compatible with the KIM-1. From the hardware point of few, the add-on boards connectors are different. An amazing little machine, but truthfully, what amazes me most is the sheer documentation that came with it, including full details on how to build up your own boards and attachments. How to wire up NMIs and anything else you'd need to know. I've shared your first video on a PAL-1 group where it generated a little bit of excitement. It is so nice to see one of those boards with working RRIOT chips, cause once those die there is no easy replacement.
It reminds me of entering in those old programs from COMPUTE! magazines, and they had their own checksum tool. I think one was a classic "race car" game where you just drive up, but the road swings from side to side.... kind of what this KIM-1 text reminded me of.
For anyone interested and wants to play along at home. PCBWay have several ready to go PCB boards for KIM-1 Replica/clones, as well as nice to have things like the 65K expansion boards.
I bought a 6502 basic for my KIM-1 from a little company that advertised in Byte or Dr. Dobbs, I think, that called itself Micro Soft (sic). I disassembled it and commented the code, learned a lot about parsing. A pen pal and I added a lot of editing features, auto line numbering etc, hooking in to the KIM bios. I still have a "Visible Memory" kicking around, 64 character bit mapped lines of text (or just normal ram if you wanted. Fun to watch a bubble sort on the monitor).. .
KIM = Keyboard Input Monitor. IIRC there was some ROM in the I/O chips that handled the hex keys and 7-seg readouts. Also read or write to a cassette tape at about 85 chars/sec, slow enough you could almost read it. I ran a faster tape routine called Ziptape(?) that did 1200 B/sec, which speeded things up a bit.
@@rowlybrown Yes, it had a 2kb ROM "monitor" program, but there wasn't much of a point into "hooking" into it. I used to have one as my first "computer" back in late 1976, shortly after it was released. After New Year, I had the money to upgrade the RAM to 4KB instead of the standard 1152 bytes, barely enough to type in (on the hex keybad) a version of the Tiny BASIC interpreter. Yes, cassette was rather slow (but hey, you COULD save your programs!) and the slowly emerging add-on cards were rather expensive. So I sold it after about 7 months or so, and started saving money to buy a better machine more than a year later in the form of one of the first Video Genie Trash-80 clones....
Seeing you enter that little BASIC program brought a smile to my face. Back "then" they were wonderous days! Thanks for making all of the not inconsiderable effort that went into this, and sharing it with us.
Older computers always amaze me. I'm really impressed by how much people could do with so little in terms of resources. The fact that the computers of the time were so unforgiving of errors just makes it that much more impressive that they got anything accomplished. As someone whose career revolved around Java heavily, I can't imagine having to write code on paper tape and getting it right every time vs. using an IDE that shows me an error right away. We've certainly come a long way.
Fascinating. I am loving these old computer videos. I can see how they were much more interesting when you could understand what is actually going on inside them.
Ah yes, brings back memories...(RAM, ROM, PTP, ETC.). I started with a Trash-80 M-1 (32K) with 4k MS basic, learned assembler, macro assembler, Fortran, Cobal, etc. Taught 16 bit Sperry Rand computers in the Navy. Then graduated to DEC PDP-11/03, 34, 44 & 73's running RT-11 and RSM-11X. Added a VAX-2 VMS system. Then downshifted to PC's starting with the PC-XT and DOS 2.0 and went on from there. Thanks so much Dave for the "memories."
Dave, I want to thank you for all your videos. I am both autistic and a low level programmer (retired). I worked in the medical imaging and game industry. The imaging work was assembler on PDP-11 and x86 platforms. Not too much to talk about. The game industry stuff had a few funny stories. Here's one I think you'll enjoy. I was doing some rasterization work for an engine that was working with the 1st generation 3D hardware in conjunction with the 1st generation of Direct X. I did the usual thing, start out with embedded geometry data to prove out the core of the routine. When I had that done I needed to import some geometry to shake down that part of the flow. The engine didn't have a file format yet so I decided to use the included ".x" file format included with the SDK to get a quick start. Things didn't go so well so I called MS for support (I was a MSDN subscriber). Well when I asked for some assistance because I couldn't open any "X" files there was silence. A few seconds later I was transferred to another person who asked "your X files"? This was during the period when the TV show of the same name was running . After a few more phone transfers I explicitly said yes, the Direct X SDK example file format and the person on the line started laughing and said, OH yeah hold on and transferred me to the Direct X group who had a good laugh with me and promptly helped me solve the problem in under 5 minutes. Thanks again, Dave. I look forward to each one of your videos, sometimes watching them more than one time.
Oh wow, I absolutely loved this video! I never had to upload to a microcomputer using paper tape, but when I first started working, we had a CNC lathe that needed punch cards to get it to do anything. It was always exciting waiting to see it run, and if you'd made a mistake that would send the cutting tool crashing into the job!
I enjoyed that, Dave. Growing up in the UK I was a '6502 kid' with the Acorn BBC Micro. As a programming exercise to learn C I wrote a 6502 Emulator and slowly added in the other IC's so I could boot the BBC OS & BBC Basic. How about a series of C programming videos showing you write a 6502 emulator core? I wrote it opcocde-by-opcode as the BBC OS Rom tried to boot, each opcode implemented got it a little further.
Complete...and I mean complete computer code gibberish to this one. I had NO idea there was ever a BASIC 1. I was so far advanced, you see, writing simple programs in BASIC 7.0. Mostly had no idea what it all meant, but it most often worked. My pride and joy accomplishment was called SIMPLE LISTER. A program that kept track of our biz's monetary comes and goes aimed at tax day. Had NO idea what I was just watching..orbital physics, whatever, but surprisingly interesting never-the-less. We used to accomplish stunning things with very little memory. Thanks!
You talking about S-Records gave me flashbacks to the early 90’s, where I had computer classes in my school. We were programming EPROMs and that was the format we used to transfer our code to the ROM. We had these crude mini computers with 7 segment displays and those big red generic push buttons for hex number entry and a plug for the bus so you could stack your own creations on top of it (or bottom, I don’t remember). I don’t think I have heard about it or stumbled across it ever since… until this video, although I have tinkered with ELF and HUNK which I think is kind of in the same street as far as loading code into correct memory locations is concerned.
Ahh, memories. I learned much from MSBASIC back in the day. My friend Greg had an OSI SuperBoard which we hacked every way we could think of. For reasons I don't recall, we decided that we wanted to know exactly how BASIC worked. I'd been working on a 6502 assembler and disassembler written in FORTRAN 4, so it's likely that we originally disassembled the ROMs just to test the disassembler. I made a printout of the disassembly on green bar paper and we got started. Eventually we bursted the entire listing into individual sheets and then bound them book style with steel bolts and nuts through the tractor feed holes. We worked our way through the entire listing, and in the process learned about floating point formats, parsing, recursive expression evaluation and many other wonderous topics. Once we had an Apple II, we naturally disassembled that ROM as well, getting into the nitty gritty of Apple II graphics and decoding the seemingly nonsensical address scrambling that was done in the graphics memory (it was done as a part of the implementation of the dynamic RAM refresh - generating the video output also served to provide all needed refresh cycles, if I recall correctly). Good times. I think there's a chance that I still have that hand commented listing around here somewhere...
All the dialects! I am enjoying the trip back to 6502 land where it began for so many of us! I dug out my Apple //e and see Applesoft in those BASIC builds!
I really liked that! Btw, I guess you could THEORETICALLY do everything on that computer. A lot of people in technical schools in Germany and Italy in the 70s learnt CS on old Olivetti computers like the Programma 101, not so much different from calculators. The really interesting thing about computers is they've much much more power today, but in their inside... You can relate things from the 60s to things from today without problems :)
@@Saavik256 as an ISA, it was definitely a stored program computer. As a commercial product, a programmable calculator. One does not exclude the other! :)
@@Saavik256 btw, if you're interested on the topic, I highly suggest you to check the HP 9100A, an American machine inspired by the P101, which had the ability to modify its own code. It really blurs the line between "a strange novelty from the 60s" and "a computer as we know today" :)
Brilliant episode, absolutely love this aspect of vintage computing. Kind of reminds me of bootstrapping my first server via rs232. Keep up the great work.
So great to see! I had a KIM-1 back in 1977 with 8K basic, 4K Forth, and Tiny Basic. I Still have the original cassette tape from Bill Gates. Neither of my KIM-1 boards work any more. Guessing the capacitors are bad. Look forward to seeing how you fix things! I no longer have the ASR-33 teletype or the hazeltine CRT, but I have all the paper tapes still. Guess I could make an optical reader
Nice - really love it when instructions work out of the box. I don't have a KIM-1 but it was great to be able to build the original binaries from source and it worked first time, so thanks for that 🙂 The only thing I changed was to install cc65 directly with "sudo apt install cc65" rather than using brew, and bingo 🙂
We used to have a boards very similar to this on my Electronics course in the 80`s called EMMA boards, almost identical, first project you had to do was get your name loaded into it and scroll it across the seven segment display. You also had to write a sorting program for a sorter that you connected to the io ports, another project was making a ram expansion for it. You had to either program it in via the keypad with the hex codes or you could write it in assembler on a PC and dump it onto the board.
Thanks Dave,this was very cool. I still have a KIM-1 purchased used in 1981. It still works and I want to keep it as it is. Instead I have collected parts to build Ben Eaters 6502 Project.
Nice one! Retro stuff brings old memories back. I still remember when I got the MS Dos 0.1 to play with. At that time I was not really impressed by 8 bit stuff but got myself a kit and started playing with these small computer board on my spare time. Developed lot of algorithms and then transferring them to other languages and OS at work. Being a Basic specialist I could do that after hours. Sold them and got gear to create sw-products. Basic was grate, even got to used a real-time industrial basic - cool. You could program complex things like matrix math with basic. Adding some assembly and you got a DB system with optimization sorting. Then became a manager and climbing the corporate ladder less programming more systems and strategy. Now retired and play with my server stack and VM’s. Still saving printouts of some old basic programs in my garage. Tempted to spin up some old stuff on a VM.
Makes me think of the old Sinclair ZX-80 my uncle had. Of course, that was later(80 being the year, I wasn't born yet, but he still had it) but being that the machine only cost £100(about $200 at contemporary exchange rate) it was a miracle machine. Even if it did only come with 1kb of RAM, RF out only and the screen would blank when a key was pressed because the I/O and frame buffer/video output were both handled by the CPU. A 3.5mHz Z80, if you're wondering. They later released the ZX-81, which cost less and had a "slow mode", which would dedicate more CPU cycles to the frame buffer/video output with a penalty on processing speed. After that was the ZX-82, known as the Spectrum, which used a ULA to keep the price low but take some of the pressure off the CPU, at least 16kb(most commonly 48k) if RAM and also had colour graphics and an internal speaker for sound. The Spectrum was the biggest selling British computer of all time until the Raspberry Pi. Saying all that, I had a C64.
I remember those days very fondly as well. It's stunning just how far we've come today in computer technology, though with the very real potential for close to 1000 watt 'gaming' GPU's (thanks Nvidia), I would that call a big step back.
cool stuff Throw back to another day. a DEC Vax 11/780 took up the back room of the business office. I had night shift, swapped 12' diameter disk pack backup at 3AM and "batch processing" of billing records @ 2400bps It's damned near time to retire!!
Before me. I only know one "Punch Tapper", they got shipped all around the world, to talk about a database they had written. My first viewed machine Sword M5, playing Snake in colour. Then a Vic-20. :) Assuming they are now all lost to us all. Last time I spoke, looking after an Intranet at local, Aerial Engineering firm. :)
I'm really interested in old retro computers. I'm currently making my own Z80 homebrew. Piecing everything together and developing software for it is really fun and fulfilling. I'd love to see this subject in one of your videos.
@@DavesGarage Suse and Ubuntu installed...just figuring out how to get my very old friend X up and running for GUI apps...if you've done this Dave, please share :) I'm loving your posts, takes me back to the 80's when I first found the Video Genie (TRS-80) ...oh the good times
I ran a Microsoft Applesoft Basic compiler to write a game program a long, long time ago. Getting it to run in 32k was quite a challenge. (Had to force a cleanup command every so often to keep the system from going to La-La land when the player was in the middle of entering a command.) I then wrote some code in compiled quickbasic to make an msdos menu/screen saver and to talk to my synth. I started to try to work with Visual Basic . . . but gave up after that . . . the fun was gone.
Nice, started out on these single board computers, before moving on the my PET 4016. Did play with a kim-1 at some point, whish i still had all the boards, only the pet stayed with me. look forward to seeing the rest of the board videos
No backspace? Where did I hear this before? A hint, it is big in the computing industry and the name starts with an A. Only working with "cap-lock" on sounds so familiar too. Just like they all went back to the same Original Source at the Dartmouth College.
Cant follow your tech stuff.....but I really enjoy listening to your voice.....reminds me of the Hearts of Space host.....maybe its your mike/recording studio etc. but its great listening.
I encountered a young lad recently who is an Excel VBA programmer. We both laughed when I said "Yeah, I've done that too". He asked about my background and I replied, "If you want to know how to boot up a Burroughs mainframe using paper tape... I'm your man." LOL
Brilliant! I used MS BASIC someone along the line in the 1980s - I think on the Intel based systems that my employer offered as an alternative to the DEC systems it sold. But, I didn't reconnect with MS BASIC until VB3 in the 1990s and then I used VB all through the 1990s. VB6 was a superb package which - in the user interface anyway, was truly object oriented. It was easy to use, had everything you needed and you could write a hello world program by adding just a couple of lines to a basic form. But, MS threw it all away and then came DotNet and endless bloatware where to create a "Hello World" program you need god knows how many modules and classes. I used to enjoy using VB6 IDE, I never enjoy using DotNet IDE. Such a shame.
Thats not old thats cuttin edge! Cant you tell they must be using that for new "ST" like Discovery, Picard etc since thats the only way in hell they can explain the absolute disaster massacre of what was once one of the 2 greatest SciFi franchises in history..
@@kindanyume I second that. The sad thing is. It was left outside a donation bin still in the box. It had been rained on enough to completely destroy it. But this thing was Never Opened. Lucky score.
Do a video on the CHRGET routine in zero page in 6502 basic! What is its function? Why is it in zero page? Why is it self modifing? Did Microsoft not know how the LDA ($ABCD, Y) addressing mode worked?
GWBASIC is as far as I could get 'coding' when I finished typing in the code from a Hypercube book's demo plus one building waveforms from Sine waves. Then Recursion, Polymorphism and one other thing has made me go, "Huh? Whazzatabout?" ever since.
As I saw the two folders CBMBASIC1 and CBMBASIC2 I remember still having a German commented ”source code“ of the CBM BASIC V2 for the C64. I just bought it as a book in a normal book store. Source code is not completly right as it is more a well-commented disassembly. Including Commodore's KERNAL.
I don't see it mentioned below, so I'll throw this out: srecords were the Motorola equivalent to intelhex. I'm not quite sure when (or if) they died out, but they were certainly in use up to the 68K days.
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Very cool - I also love the analogies of "this is what real 2400 baud would be like".. then 19.2K and finally 115kbaud. I spent so much time with baud rates running a BBS from 86-94 that all of these numbers resonate with me.. (my first modem was 300 baud..) Thanks Dave!
Damn, I was thinking my 56kb modem was ancient lmao.
whats sad is I remember them all and even could understand almost all of the sounds made by the old modems including what connection rate was settled on by variances in the sound.. where my wife just looked at me when she learned that and gave me a look as if to say "Bloody hell u know that but you cant remember peoples names????"
my 1st modem I owned was a 110 baud btw.. and the BBS days.. ahh soo long ago.. so much of my work got distribed that way along with Fidonet of course and traced way back to long before BBS's really existed.. but damn now i'm really datin myself @_@
Remember 450 baud ? Even a little better was still better.
Your timeline and mine are pretty much identical. Bought my first Commodore in 1985...went online BBSing in 1986. Nearly went broke with GEnie. Purchased my first clone in 1995. Made my first internet pen pals in 1996. First website in 1998.
@@kindanyume I was a Commodore guy. We had a computer club here called OCCUG. Occasional Calhoun County User Group. Commodore, IBM, and Apple snob guys. The biggie IBM guy was retired from a very large gubment weapons depot where he ran the computer operation. Climate controlled room, the works. He told me quite confidently that back in the day they had 30 megs.... Count 'em. THIRTY megs of storage. Who could EVER need more than that?!...he finished.
My first basic program I used in 1967 on GE 265 time-sharing terminal in high school. We saved our programs on paper tape that had punch holes.
Funny! I still use MS Quick Basic for aircraft and missile simulations and provide video to demonstrate all sorts of characteristics to my classes in flight mechanics and orbital mechanics. It drives my students nuts and the questions never end. I like it!
I have a KIM-1 replica called the PAL-1. From the software point of view it is 100% compatible with the KIM-1. From the hardware point of few, the add-on boards connectors are different. An amazing little machine, but truthfully, what amazes me most is the sheer documentation that came with it, including full details on how to build up your own boards and attachments. How to wire up NMIs and anything else you'd need to know.
I've shared your first video on a PAL-1 group where it generated a little bit of excitement.
It is so nice to see one of those boards with working RRIOT chips, cause once those die there is no easy replacement.
It reminds me of entering in those old programs from COMPUTE! magazines, and they had their own checksum tool.
I think one was a classic "race car" game where you just drive up, but the road swings from side to side.... kind of what this KIM-1 text reminded me of.
For anyone interested and wants to play along at home. PCBWay have several ready to go PCB boards for KIM-1 Replica/clones, as well as nice to have things like the 65K expansion boards.
Corsham sells them ready to turn on (ie: not a kit!)
I wish RUclips had a love button. You have taught me more in a hand full of videos than I was able to learn in school. Thank you.
Wow, thank you!
Im a big fan from romania ! It is always nice to get notificated about Dave’s new videos!
Cheers
I bought a 6502 basic for my KIM-1 from a little company that advertised in Byte or Dr. Dobbs, I think, that called itself Micro Soft (sic). I disassembled it and commented the code, learned a lot about parsing. A pen pal and I added a lot of editing features, auto line numbering etc, hooking in to the KIM bios. I still have a "Visible Memory" kicking around, 64 character bit mapped lines of text (or just normal ram if you wanted. Fun to watch a bubble sort on the monitor).. .
KIM BIOS?
KIM = Keyboard Input Monitor. IIRC there was some ROM in the I/O chips that handled the hex keys and 7-seg readouts. Also read or write to a cassette tape at about 85 chars/sec, slow enough you could almost read it. I ran a faster tape routine called Ziptape(?) that did 1200 B/sec, which speeded things up a bit.
@@rowlybrown Yes, it had a 2kb ROM "monitor" program, but there wasn't much of a point into "hooking" into it. I used to have one as my first "computer" back in late 1976, shortly after it was released. After New Year, I had the money to upgrade the RAM to 4KB instead of the standard 1152 bytes, barely enough to type in (on the hex keybad) a version of the Tiny BASIC interpreter. Yes, cassette was rather slow (but hey, you COULD save your programs!) and the slowly emerging add-on cards were rather expensive. So I sold it after about 7 months or so, and started saving money to buy a better machine more than a year later in the form of one of the first Video Genie Trash-80 clones....
I love all this retro goodness!
Seeing you enter that little BASIC program brought a smile to my face. Back "then" they were wonderous days! Thanks for making all of the not inconsiderable effort that went into this, and sharing it with us.
Older computers always amaze me. I'm really impressed by how much people could do with so little in terms of resources. The fact that the computers of the time were so unforgiving of errors just makes it that much more impressive that they got anything accomplished. As someone whose career revolved around Java heavily, I can't imagine having to write code on paper tape and getting it right every time vs. using an IDE that shows me an error right away.
We've certainly come a long way.
Fascinating. I am loving these old computer videos. I can see how they were much more interesting when you could understand what is actually going on inside them.
Dave, I have to admit watching your Channel is just fun because learning original computer information is just fun...
Ah yes, brings back memories...(RAM, ROM, PTP, ETC.). I started with a Trash-80 M-1 (32K) with 4k MS basic, learned assembler, macro assembler, Fortran, Cobal, etc. Taught 16 bit Sperry Rand computers in the Navy. Then graduated to DEC PDP-11/03, 34, 44 & 73's running RT-11 and RSM-11X. Added a VAX-2 VMS system. Then downshifted to PC's starting with the PC-XT and DOS 2.0 and went on from there. Thanks so much Dave for the "memories."
Dave, I want to thank you for all your videos.
I am both autistic and a low level programmer (retired).
I worked in the medical imaging and game industry. The imaging work was assembler on PDP-11 and x86 platforms. Not too much to talk about. The game industry stuff had a few funny stories. Here's one I think you'll enjoy.
I was doing some rasterization work for an engine that was working with the 1st generation 3D hardware in conjunction with the 1st generation of Direct X. I did the usual thing, start out with embedded geometry data to prove out the core of the routine. When I had that done I needed to import some geometry to shake down that part of the flow. The engine didn't have a file format yet so I decided to use the included ".x" file format included with the SDK to get a quick start. Things didn't go so well so I called MS for support (I was a MSDN subscriber). Well when I asked for some assistance because I couldn't open any "X" files there was silence. A few seconds later I was transferred to another person who asked "your X files"? This was during the period when the TV show of the same name was running .
After a few more phone transfers I explicitly said yes, the Direct X SDK example file format and the person on the line started laughing and said, OH yeah hold on and transferred me to the Direct X group who had a good laugh with me and promptly helped me solve the problem in under 5 minutes.
Thanks again, Dave. I look forward to each one of your videos, sometimes watching them more than one time.
Oh wow, I absolutely loved this video!
I never had to upload to a microcomputer using paper tape, but when I first started working, we had a CNC lathe that needed punch cards to get it to do anything.
It was always exciting waiting to see it run, and if you'd made a mistake that would send the cutting tool crashing into the job!
Seeing "MEMORY SIZE" at start brought back old warm memories of my TRS-80 Model I Level II my first comp ever when I was 9 or 10.
I enjoyed that, Dave. Growing up in the UK I was a '6502 kid' with the Acorn BBC Micro. As a programming exercise to learn C I wrote a 6502 Emulator and slowly added in the other IC's so I could boot the BBC OS & BBC Basic. How about a series of C programming videos showing you write a 6502 emulator core? I wrote it opcocde-by-opcode as the BBC OS Rom tried to boot, each opcode implemented got it a little further.
I longed for a BBC Acorn computer. I had to make do with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
Complete...and I mean complete computer code gibberish to this one. I had NO idea there was ever a BASIC 1. I was so far advanced, you see, writing simple programs in BASIC 7.0. Mostly had no idea what it all meant, but it most often worked. My pride and joy accomplishment was called SIMPLE LISTER. A program that kept track of our biz's monetary comes and goes aimed at tax day.
Had NO idea what I was just watching..orbital physics, whatever, but surprisingly interesting never-the-less. We used to accomplish stunning things with very little memory. Thanks!
Package manager for brewers, lol.... I do love how all the action terms that brew uses are related to a fermenting liquid.
Pretty sure he said "a package manager for bro's"
You talking about S-Records gave me flashbacks to the early 90’s, where I had computer classes in my school. We were programming EPROMs and that was the format we used to transfer our code to the ROM.
We had these crude mini computers with 7 segment displays and those big red generic push buttons for hex number entry and a plug for the bus so you could stack your own creations on top of it (or bottom, I don’t remember).
I don’t think I have heard about it or stumbled across it ever since… until this video, although I have tinkered with ELF and HUNK which I think is kind of in the same street as far as loading code into correct memory locations is concerned.
Ahh, memories. I learned much from MSBASIC back in the day. My friend Greg had an OSI SuperBoard which we hacked every way we could think of. For reasons I don't recall, we decided that we wanted to know exactly how BASIC worked. I'd been working on a 6502 assembler and disassembler written in FORTRAN 4, so it's likely that we originally disassembled the ROMs just to test the disassembler. I made a printout of the disassembly on green bar paper and we got started. Eventually we bursted the entire listing into individual sheets and then bound them book style with steel bolts and nuts through the tractor feed holes. We worked our way through the entire listing, and in the process learned about floating point formats, parsing, recursive expression evaluation and many other wonderous topics. Once we had an Apple II, we naturally disassembled that ROM as well, getting into the nitty gritty of Apple II graphics and decoding the seemingly nonsensical address scrambling that was done in the graphics memory (it was done as a part of the implementation of the dynamic RAM refresh - generating the video output also served to provide all needed refresh cycles, if I recall correctly). Good times. I think there's a chance that I still have that hand commented listing around here somewhere...
This channel rocks !
"Run MS BASIC from the source code" is on my bucket list
Oh man, you make me SO nostalgic for the old computing days. Loved these sorts of machines.
All the dialects! I am enjoying the trip back to 6502 land where it began for so many of us!
I dug out my Apple //e and see Applesoft in those BASIC builds!
I really liked that! Btw, I guess you could THEORETICALLY do everything on that computer. A lot of people in technical schools in Germany and Italy in the 70s learnt CS on old Olivetti computers like the Programma 101, not so much different from calculators.
The really interesting thing about computers is they've much much more power today, but in their inside... You can relate things from the 60s to things from today without problems :)
Programma 101 was exactly that, a programmable calculator.
@@Saavik256 as an ISA, it was definitely a stored program computer. As a commercial product, a programmable calculator. One does not exclude the other! :)
Wikipedia explains it with good details and some nice references.
@@Saavik256 btw, if you're interested on the topic, I highly suggest you to check the HP 9100A, an American machine inspired by the P101, which had the ability to modify its own code. It really blurs the line between "a strange novelty from the 60s" and "a computer as we know today" :)
Theoretically meaning, the only limitations are the limited amount of RAM and the limited execution speed.
Brilliant episode, absolutely love this aspect of vintage computing. Kind of reminds me of bootstrapping my first server via rs232. Keep up the great work.
Fantastic video, I loved this thank you so much for sharing.
Thanks for watching!
I love when you do the assembly stuff, however this was an awesome video. Looking forward to more KIM-1 related topics!
So great to see! I had a KIM-1 back in 1977 with 8K basic, 4K Forth, and Tiny Basic. I Still have the original cassette tape from Bill Gates. Neither of my KIM-1 boards work any more. Guessing the capacitors are bad. Look forward to seeing how you fix things! I no longer have the ASR-33 teletype or the hazeltine CRT, but I have all the paper tapes still. Guess I could make an optical reader
Very BASIC, very ADVANCED. Nice details! Thx Dave.
Nice - really love it when instructions work out of the box. I don't have a KIM-1 but it was great to be able to build the original binaries from source and it worked first time, so thanks for that 🙂
The only thing I changed was to install cc65 directly with "sudo apt install cc65" rather than using brew, and bingo 🙂
"This could be painful." A virtuoso performance that brings back memories. Great job!
You bring us so much joy, your big Bulgarian fen.
We used to have a boards very similar to this on my Electronics course in the 80`s called EMMA boards, almost identical, first project you had to do was get your name loaded into it and scroll it across the seven segment display. You also had to write a sorting program for a sorter that you connected to the io ports, another project was making a ram expansion for it. You had to either program it in via the keypad with the hex codes or you could write it in assembler on a PC and dump it onto the board.
Smiling over here. Love the history and demo.
This is everything I had hoped. Thanks
I loved this!! Thanks for taking the time to create it!
Thanks Dave,this was very cool. I still have a KIM-1 purchased used in 1981. It still works and I want to keep it as it is. Instead I have collected parts to build Ben Eaters 6502 Project.
You learn so much more by working with the hardware. Thank you for the videos. :)
Thanks for watching
Nice one! Retro stuff brings old memories back. I still remember when I got the MS Dos 0.1 to play with. At that time I was not really impressed by 8 bit stuff but got myself a kit and started playing with these small computer board on my spare time. Developed lot of algorithms and then transferring them to other languages and OS at work. Being a Basic specialist I could do that after hours. Sold them and got gear to create sw-products. Basic was grate, even got to used a real-time industrial basic - cool. You could program complex things like matrix math with basic. Adding some assembly and you got a DB system with optimization sorting.
Then became a manager and climbing the corporate ladder less programming more systems and strategy.
Now retired and play with my server stack and VM’s. Still saving printouts of some old basic programs in my garage. Tempted to spin up some old stuff on a VM.
Love this stuff Dave! keep the KIM-1 stuff coming
As ever, I love this Dave. The KIM-1 series is fascinating. More!
Whatever it might be, watching someone highly proficient in something is always a pleasure. Nice one Dave!!
Well chosen topic.. and great behind the curtain insight into scalability, that was about to become the MS story.
Need more of this.
Makes me think of the old Sinclair ZX-80 my uncle had. Of course, that was later(80 being the year, I wasn't born yet, but he still had it) but being that the machine only cost £100(about $200 at contemporary exchange rate) it was a miracle machine. Even if it did only come with 1kb of RAM, RF out only and the screen would blank when a key was pressed because the I/O and frame buffer/video output were both handled by the CPU. A 3.5mHz Z80, if you're wondering.
They later released the ZX-81, which cost less and had a "slow mode", which would dedicate more CPU cycles to the frame buffer/video output with a penalty on processing speed. After that was the ZX-82, known as the Spectrum, which used a ULA to keep the price low but take some of the pressure off the CPU, at least 16kb(most commonly 48k) if RAM and also had colour graphics and an internal speaker for sound.
The Spectrum was the biggest selling British computer of all time until the Raspberry Pi.
Saying all that, I had a C64.
I remember those days very fondly as well. It's stunning just how far we've come today in computer technology, though with the very real potential for close to 1000 watt 'gaming' GPU's (thanks Nvidia), I would that call a big step back.
Whoa! You're a madman. Respect.
I remember using Microsoft Basic on my brothers 8086 PC, back in around 1990. Not quite as ancient as the Kim 1, but still
Loved it, Dave. Takes me back to the day :)
Fantastic video, I love your series for C64 and the Commodore PETs. Thanks Dave !!!!
Also, white on blue. That is my favorite combination. Super easy on the eyes.
Mine too!
Fun fact: The BASIC Dave used isn't Microsoft/KIM-1 specific. It runs quite well on BBC BASIC V via RISCOS on the Raspberry Pi.
I’d have quite happily watched it transfer in real time, glass of beer, maybe Steely Dan playing in the background :)
Awesome! More please!
thanks Dave
just what i needed after the day i had today :) happy bunny again .
the good old days
Srecords were originally used by Mtorola for its cusomers to submit binay data for mask programmed production roms.It's similar to uuencode,
I wasn't expecting a starwars reference 👍
cool stuff
Throw back to another day.
a DEC Vax 11/780 took up the back room of the business office.
I had night shift, swapped 12' diameter disk pack backup at 3AM and "batch processing" of billing records @ 2400bps
It's damned near time to retire!!
Before me. I only know one "Punch Tapper", they got shipped all around the world, to talk about a database they had written. My first viewed machine Sword M5, playing Snake in colour. Then a Vic-20. :) Assuming they are now all lost to us all. Last time I spoke, looking after an Intranet at local, Aerial Engineering firm. :)
Wow u didn't know that they had released the GWBASIC source code. That's awesome.
Loved it and can't wait for more!
Great video! Keep being awesome!
I'm really interested in old retro computers. I'm currently making my own Z80 homebrew. Piecing everything together and developing software for it is really fun and fulfilling. I'd love to see this subject in one of your videos.
Never knew about WSL...thank you!!!!
It's amazing.
@@DavesGarage Suse and Ubuntu installed...just figuring out how to get my very old friend X up and running for GUI apps...if you've done this Dave, please share :) I'm loving your posts, takes me back to the 80's when I first found the Video Genie (TRS-80) ...oh the good times
Love this video. Didn't understand much though. But Basic was my first language in college in '81, and with my Vic-20 with 4k ram.
Loving these videos! Keep it up
I ran a Microsoft Applesoft Basic compiler to write a game program a long, long time ago. Getting it to run in 32k was quite a challenge. (Had to force a cleanup command every so often to keep the system from going to La-La land when the player was in the middle of entering a command.) I then wrote some code in compiled quickbasic to make an msdos menu/screen saver and to talk to my synth. I started to try to work with Visual Basic . . . but gave up after that . . . the fun was gone.
Nice, started out on these single board computers, before moving on the my PET 4016.
Did play with a kim-1 at some point, whish i still had all the boards, only the pet stayed with me.
look forward to seeing the rest of the board videos
So cool!! Reminds me of using my apple 2. I wish I'd never got rid of it.
Love the 6502. Have to find my VIC-20 someday.
No backspace? Where did I hear this before? A hint, it is big in the computing industry and the name starts with an A. Only working with "cap-lock" on sounds so familiar too. Just like they all went back to the same Original Source at the Dartmouth College.
Paper Tape ,,, Dave you gotta get one !!! Last paper tape I saw was on a PDP-11
Cant follow your tech stuff.....but I really enjoy listening to your voice.....reminds me of the Hearts of Space host.....maybe its your mike/recording studio etc. but its great listening.
I encountered a young lad recently who is an Excel VBA programmer. We both laughed when I said "Yeah, I've done that too". He asked about my background and I replied, "If you want to know how to boot up a Burroughs mainframe using paper tape... I'm your man." LOL
10 minutes to do what would have taken a week (assuming access to source code) back in "the day". Impressive work.
I'm standing on the shoulders of giants who have done it for real!
Brilliant! I used MS BASIC someone along the line in the 1980s - I think on the Intel based systems that my employer offered as an alternative to the DEC systems it sold. But, I didn't reconnect with MS BASIC until VB3 in the 1990s and then I used VB all through the 1990s. VB6 was a superb package which - in the user interface anyway, was truly object oriented. It was easy to use, had everything you needed and you could write a hello world program by adding just a couple of lines to a basic form. But, MS threw it all away and then came DotNet and endless bloatware where to create a "Hello World" program you need god knows how many modules and classes. I used to enjoy using VB6 IDE, I never enjoy using DotNet IDE. Such a shame.
The irony of you using a Mac to do this is awesome
That was awesome. Oldest machine I have is the LaserSX486 StarTrek 25th Anniversary Edition. I’ve powered it on 2 times.
Thats not old thats cuttin edge!
Cant you tell they must be using that for new "ST" like Discovery, Picard etc since thats the only way in hell they can explain the absolute disaster massacre of what was once one of the 2 greatest SciFi franchises in history..
@@kindanyume I second that. The sad thing is. It was left outside a donation bin still in the box. It had been rained on enough to completely destroy it. But this thing was Never Opened.
Lucky score.
There's a specific functionality of the KIM-1 that I believe the emulators have implemented wrong. Would you be interested in testing it for me.
Feel free to reach out for me. My PAL-1 should be identical to an actual KIM-1 (saving the ROR bug of the original models).
Kudos for using a cute retro 80's font and analog looking video post-processing on your virtual terminal.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Lovely video! I am a historical linguist who knows some python, but even I could understand most of what was going on here :)
Do a video on the CHRGET routine in zero page in 6502 basic! What is its function? Why is it in zero page? Why is it self modifing? Did Microsoft not know how the LDA ($ABCD, Y) addressing mode worked?
Hah, I *really* got this, from start to finish. That reminded me I'm old.. :-) Thank you.
Like number 256 🙂
Thanks for sharing this, informative and very nice example of getting it to run!
Cool. I'd love to see you do a video about the Dick Smith VZ-200 (vtech) computer. Thanks Dave.
GWBASIC is as far as I could get 'coding' when I finished typing in the code from a Hypercube book's demo plus one building waveforms from Sine waves.
Then Recursion, Polymorphism and one other thing has made me go, "Huh? Whazzatabout?" ever since.
That is really neat.
As I saw the two folders CBMBASIC1 and CBMBASIC2 I remember still having a German commented ”source code“ of the CBM BASIC V2 for the C64. I just bought it as a book in a normal book store. Source code is not completly right as it is more a well-commented disassembly. Including Commodore's KERNAL.
So cool, we want more
Too funny, brings back lots of memories
I don't see it mentioned below, so I'll throw this out: srecords were the Motorola equivalent to intelhex. I'm not quite sure when (or if) they died out, but they were certainly in use up to the 68K days.
Hah, I just managed yesterday evening to reconnect my Apple II via serial to my newest PC. Will try that little basic program.
How do you know everything? serious question.
I've got myself the Corsham boards. Time to get the Swedish made clone to do something useful. :)
Great video.. Keep up the good work.
Superb!
Yes! I understood some of those words!