On 03/26/2016 10:03 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:

| From: James Knott <james.knott@rogers.com>

| Incidentally, a show I used to watch was "The Computer Chronicles" on | PBS. Gary Killdall, the creator of CP/M, was a regular on that show.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7P16mYDIJw>

The Computer Chronicles: UNIX (1985)

Of course, we can't forget Linux! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8zUW62oGKc

On 2016-03-27 05:19 PM, Dev Guy wrote:

I just started to watch the TVO episode and had a good laugh of the tape loading the software

Hey, don't knock 'em. They were cheap and pretty reliable. For some reason (import tariffs? lower disposable income?) floppy drives were pretty rare in the UK. They were still faster than a Commodore 64 disk drive, though. Odd that a company that had its own chip fab was so profligate with resources, when UK computers - built from generic chips and a whole load of corner-cutting - could do more with much less. If you wish to relive the joys of tape data storage, he's a KCS format reader/writer that I've used to send and receive data from very old computers: http://dabeaz.blogspot.ca/2010/08/decoding-superboard-ii-cassette-audio.html If you want a more useful transfer method, Kamal Mostafa's minimodem is included in most distros. It's a general purpose software FSK modem. For maximal annoyance of everyone around you, try using minimodem and your computer speakers to send files to a nearby computer. It really works! cheers, Stewart

...

I just started to watch the TVO episode and had a good laugh of the tape loading the software

Hey, don't knock 'em. They were cheap and pretty reliable. For some reason (import tariffs? lower disposable income?) floppy drives were pretty rare in the UK. They were still faster than a Commodore 64 disk drive, though.

Of the C64 floppy disk drive it was said 'Loads programs faster than you can type them in...but only just.' Apparently there was some sort of handshaking bug that prevented the drive from running at full speed, and so they crippled it with a delay loop somewhere. -- Peter Hiscocks Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto http://www.syscompdesign.com USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator 647-839-0325

I have seen alternate floppy interfaces for the C64 which loaded a LOT faster than the stock serial interface. The drives were capable of much more than the serial interface they used.

When I was at Logo Computer Systems in Montreal, we modified the firmware (you could upload new code at boot) of the floppy drive to permit our application (Logo for C-64) to load much faster than it normally would (still using the same serial interface). Law of unintended consequences: it turned out that lots of schools would actually share a floppy drive (they were expensive) between multiple C-64's using some kind of cockamamie network. Needless to say our hack didn't work with it. I was the contact person for the schools and I heard about it frequently. Killed the product. On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 10:21 PM, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 10:11:02PM -0400, phiscock@ee.ryerson.ca wrote:

...

Of the C64 floppy disk drive it was said 'Loads programs faster than you can type them in...but only just.'

Apparently there was some sort of handshaking bug that prevented the drive from running at full speed, and so they crippled it with a delay loop somewhere.

I have seen alternate floppy interfaces for the C64 which loaded a LOT faster than the stock serial interface. The drives were capable of much more than the serial interface they used.

-- Len Sorensen --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

-- ===== Ian Garmaise Consultant Phorix Solutions Group ian.g@phorixsol.com Skype: iantor Toronto cell: 416.432.2251 NYC: 917.512.9535 http://www.PhorixSol.com

|| When I was at Logo Computer Systems in Montreal, | Now there was (is?) an interesting company. They are still in business, focusing mostly on Microworlds. | I think Papert was involved. (One of the inventors of Logo). In fact, | I inferred that several MIT folks were involved. Papert was chairman. He is still around but has serious health challenges. Other major MIT figure was Papert's student, Brian Silverman, VP R&D, with whom I'm still good friends. All of the 6502, 8088, Z80 (MSX) versions were written in assembly language using our own custom tools running on CADR Lisp machines (which I maintained). | They manage to implement a very nice logo on several 8-bit machines. | We had a Logo cartridge for our Atari 800xl. But they did apple and | (duh) c64 too. | Their logo on the Atari 800xl was much nicer than the Digital Research | logo on the Atari ST (a much more powerful machine). I don't believe we had anything to do with Atari ST Logo, although we did other work for DR. Atari 800 Logo was an amazing achievement given the constraints, as was C-64 Logo (sprites were a killer on that one according to a developer I spoke to). I finally met Nolan Bushnell last year, not sure he had much to do with Atari Logo, but he knew who Papert was. I thanked him for Pong, the original Atari machines, and Chuck E Cheese. Forgot to mention hiring Jobs and Wozniak. | They went on to create Microworlds. The system programming language | used internally was Logo (not exposed to the users). After all, Logo | at its heart has a lisp spirit, so it is quite capable (with their | extra primitives). We also created Lego Logo, the forerunner of some more recent Lego products. | For a U of T course, we extended Microworlds for program animation. | With the help of a very sharp guy from LCS (20 years later I no longer | remember his name). (Might be Brian). I worked there for 10 years, from just before Mac Logo (never went anywhere, actually it was called Microsoft Logo (believe it or not)) to the Microworlds era. On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 6:27 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh@mimosa.com> wrote:

| From: Ian Garmaise <ian.g@phorixsol.com>

| When I was at Logo Computer Systems in Montreal,

Now there was (is?) an interesting company.

I think Papert was involved. (One of the inventors of Logo). In fact, I inferred that several MIT folks were involved.

They manage to implement a very nice logo on several 8-bit machines. We had a Logo cartridge for our Atari 800xl. But they did apple and (duh) c64 too.

Their logo on the Atari 800xl was much nicer than the Digital Research logo on the Atari ST (a much more powerful machine).

They went on to create Microworlds. The system programming language used internally was Logo (not exposed to the users). After all, Logo at its heart has a lisp spirit, so it is quite capable (with their extra primitives).

For a U of T course, we extended Microworlds for program animation. With the help of a very sharp guy from LCS (20 years later I no longer remember his name). --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

-- ===== Ian Garmaise Consultant Phorix Solutions Group ian.g@phorixsol.com Skype: iantor Toronto cell: 416.432.2251 NYC: 917.512.9535 http://www.PhorixSol.com

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 11:53 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh@mimosa.com> wrote:

I was very impressed by the outright competence they displayed.

What bothers me is that such competence was not enough to get world dominance.

Which brings me to where I'm at now, helping to turn innovations into profitable businesses that hopefully will employ Canadians. LCSI was successful to the extent that they created world-class technology and products sold all over the world, and employed quite a few people in Montreal who have gone on to interesting careers and in some cases started successful companies. The thing which hurt LCSI was the change in pedagogy as it related to computers, i.e. schools for a time lost interest in teaching students how to program. Also, our close alliance with Apple was hurt when they discontinued the Apple //e/gs etc. The Macs for a long time were too expensive for schools. It took a while until schools could afford computers powerful enough to run something like Microworlds.

Kind of like the Logo project in general. There are so many things right about Logo and yet is has kind of disappeared.

- The Consutructivist foundation of the project is a compelling idea.

- the fact that there was actually a well thought out philosophical underpinning ought to have made a big difference.

- there was a lot of supporting literature. For example, Brian Harvey's books (for the technically inclined). But lots of pedagogical material too. And lots of gateway documentation.

- the beautiful simplicity and power of the language

- the brilliant minds behind it (eg. MIT and BBN).

- the turtle! Great in so many ways.

- The austerity might have been a problem but Microworlds removed that block.

- logo implementations widely available. For example, Brian Harvey's UCBlogo is open source and runs on Linux (and Windows, and ...)

All good points. A lot of good opportunities were missed but I see positive signs now (e.g. the the new British curriculum for computers).

Wow. I didn't know that anything practical had been done with lisp machines. I also didn't know that anyone without deep corporate pockets bought them. They seemed a part of the first AI boom/crash.

They weren't cheap, and not cheap to maintain either. We had significant investor support, otherwise we never could have had them. The productivity of those systems was second to none, the cross-assemblers and symbolic debuggers were terrific. I remember that the 8088 assembler was two pages of lisp. Here's what's more amazing, after a while, as you know, the Lisp machine industry fell apart (I myself had gone down to Boston to figure out what was going on, on which trip, where I visited LMI in Cambridge and Andover, I nearly ran into Stallman at the point of his total disillusionment with the Lisp machine drama and the start of his Gnu adventure). I did meet Richard Greenblatt, co-designer of the Lisp machine, and reputed to be one of the greatest hackers of all time. Didn't really know who he was at the time, he was kind of in the background. So, no more Lisp machines. So we implemented Lisp on the //gs (4 MB ram) and carried on as before, except that the development machines cost less then 1% of what their predecessors did.

Yeah. I don't even know what the memory requirement was but you could not use more than 48k of RAM on the Atari 800 (the system itself was in a ROM cartridge, possibly bank-switched). That's fairly tight for logo -- assembly code would seem mandatory on those horrible-for-compilers 8-bit architectures.

Definitely assembly was the only way to go for 6502 platforms, even when more memory was available (//e, etc.) Fortunately we were pretty good at it :) Brian pretty much knew all the opcodes by heart. -- ===== Ian Garmaise Consultant Phorix Solutions Group ian.g@phorixsol.com Skype: iantor Toronto cell: 416.432.2251 NYC: 917.512.9535 http://www.PhorixSol.com

On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 09:43:15AM -0400, Ian Garmaise wrote:

...

I have seen alternate floppy interfaces for the C64 which loaded a LOT faster than the stock serial interface. The drives were capable of much more than the serial interface they used.

When I was at Logo Computer Systems in Montreal, we modified the firmware (you could upload new code at boot) of the floppy drive to permit our application (Logo for C-64) to load much faster than it normally would (still using the same serial interface).

Law of unintended consequences: it turned out that lots of schools would actually share a floppy drive (they were expensive) between multiple C-64's using some kind of cockamamie network. Needless to say our hack didn't work with it. I was the contact person for the schools and I heard about it frequently. Killed the product.

Yes my highschool had such a setup. If you knew the right commands you could load the same program on all the machines in parallel which saved time. Also allowed sharing one printer of course. -- Len Sorensen