Argh, suddenly I feel old..
My first computer (1978) is still somewehere up in the attic. This was an
'Elf II', which came in the form of a printed circuit board, two wooden
blocks (on which you could mount the board), a plastic bag full of
electronic components, a plastic bag full of keys for the on-board
hexadecimal input keyboard and a stack of bad photocopies explaining how to
assemble and how to program the thing.
It had an 1802 processor and all of 256 bytes (yes: bytes - no kilo or
anything in front of it) of memory - and part of that was used as video
memory.. It had no external storage whatsoever and in fact, it didn't even
have a BIOS. (A couple of months later I added an extension with a BIOS, a
cassette interface and a whopping 16 kB memory. Still later I expanded the
memory to an 'enormous' 64 kB and added a color video display, a 'real'
keyboard and even a printer - an Epson which you'd better not drop - not
that it would have damaged the printer, but it would probably have damaged
the floor..)
And yes, I had lots of fun with it. I still have the listing somewhere of
the game of Life I wrote for it, which fitted (easily) in 128 bytes and
used the remaining 128 bytes as video memory.
Wim
Op Thu, 17 Nov 2005 16:14:50 -0500 schreef RDN:
