how did you get into dev (for those inclined to do so)?

[tmo]

On 10/27/2022 at 9:22 PM, Roy Eltham said:

I was 10 when I got a new Atari 2600 for Christmas. Playing games on there (and in the arcades) made me want to be able to make my own video games.



I learned BASIC via typing in programs from BYTE magazine and then modifying them.



Maybe 6 months later a friend of the family gave me a hand me down VIC-20 (they had gotten a C64), that's when I started learning 6502 ASM, writing out ASM on paper to figure out the bytes to plug into a BASIC program and then run.  I also made a working breakout game for it.



 I learned everything from books, magazines, and BBS postings/chats.



 

Atari 2600 was my first exposure to consoles, too. We had a 2600 since I had living memory, as my folks bought one for my two (much) older sisters before I was born. I asked profusely for an NES in 1990, and I got it, but until then I was hooked on the 2600. I'd say that the Atari 2600 was the only piece of "computer electronics" we had in our house when I was young, outside of the stray digital clock here and there.

I'd LOVE to get my hands on an old issue of BYTE, esp when I get my "init commit" project (which I am calling "TicP" for "The init commit Project") up and going, because I want to find some old BASIC games to write via magazine. They (BASIC game code) exist online, but that's not the "FUN" in it!, haha.

Breakout was avail for the very first Apple II, yea? I think it was one of the few pieces of software Apple released for the machine at launch, and little else.

I learned everything (in regards to (web) development, and now "dev" in general) via the internet. Stack Overflow, sometimes Github documentation, blog/website posts, a LOT of official documentation, and W3 schools and every so often going down a rabbit hole in "tutorial hell" (which people may want to be wary of - a lot of time can be wasted pursuing code examples that aren't 100% proven (and are also completely unofficial)).

Thanks for the response! ?

[tmo]

On 10/27/2022 at 6:50 PM, Edmond D said:

I've got a friend who probably has every PDP ever made. I helped him scrap over 50 DecWritter IIs for parts; it had a nice rotary encoder in it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECwriter



Unfortunately we have to wait for the X16. Until then I hope others post on how they got into computing.



 

I checked out the DecWriter on that wiki link, and it looks like it was a fairly expensive piece of machinery (essentially a teletype, all in all?) at the time. I am guessing it was for an org that 50 of them were scrapped, because I couldn't imagine an individual having/needing 50 of such devices.

Yes, I hope to hear more stories and intro (to computing/consoles/development) stories on this thread. Fun to read! ?

[Edmond D]

On 10/28/2022 at 1:28 AM, tmo said:

I checked out the DecWriter on that wiki link, and it looks like it was a fairly expensive piece of machinery (essentially a teletype, all in all?) at the time. I am guessing it was for an org that 50 of them were scrapped, because I couldn't imagine an individual having/needing 50 of such devices.

I'm not sure of the retail price of the DecWriters when new. They were more than a teletype, since one could program the mainframe from them - all the input was printed as well as the output too.

My friend worked at a large university which had quarterly disposal auctions, that's how he got them, and for very cheap too. He didn't need them, but knew the internals which still have value. I'm also into electronics and was willing to help him reuse/recycle parts. It was a fun task dismantling them.  



I collected at these auctions as well. Basically items were sold in lots, sometimes I had to purchase a whole pallet to get the one device I wanted. The university ensured that you removed everything you bought, otherwise you were excluded from any future purchases. I had 2 and 1/2 car garage with workshop and a basement packed with stuff - floor to ceiling . One move I "e-cycled" 200 computer devices, the next move there was more gone. The last move resulted in having a crawlspace packed with old stuff, such as five Vic-20's and related devices.  I do need to downsize more, as the Windows 1.0 disks have value, just not to me. Despite all of this my wife still loves me ?

Anyway, thanks for starting this thread, hopefully more people post their stories.

 

 

[tmo]

2 1/2 car garage + basement sounds like a lotta retro! haha ?

I've thought of trying my hand at some garage sales locally for old computer gear, or perhaps venturing to a Goodwill, but I haven't done so, yet.

And sign me up for a VIC-20! haha

Here's hoping more people post their stories on dev/computing soon - fun times

[Edmond D]

On 10/27/2022 at 9:15 PM, kelli217 said:

On 10/27/2022 at 4:50 PM, Edmond D said:

I've got a friend who probably has every PDP ever made.

Even a PDP-10?

Alas, no. There was one at the university he worked at (psych department), but it went in the late 80's.  

[kaos]

It was in the 1990ies sometime, and i was maybe 12 years old.

A friend of mine, and I, used our breaks in school to discuss how computers could maybe work. We knew they used binary, so we invented our own binary number system, which i think was some kind of bastard-version of grey-coded binary. Then we worked out how addition could work, using that. Pictures must logically also be binary we decided. It was possible to deduce the very absolute fundamentals with common sense.

Later sitting in the school cafeteria and my friend was telling me that it was possible to remote control computers (we didn't know it was called hacking then), and that viruses could spread between programs.

I got all excited and wanted to learn how to do that. But it took a while to even learn where to find the knowledge. Google didn't exist back then.

Some time passed.

I read in a computer magazine that listed nice web pages to visit, about a virus tutorial, and later that day I dialed up and went there. I copied the tutorial so I could read it over and over and over when offline. But it was a bit too complicated, and I needed more knowledge of assembly to grasp all the fine details.

So I bought a book about x86 assembly. The book clerk tried to stop me, warning me that assembly was a dead language. I just ignored him, since obviously machine code can never die.

We went to my great-grandmother, that lived in the northern parts of Sweden. It was midsummer, so the sun just barely went under the horizon, causing a constant day that lasts for weeks.

We stayed for a week, and I read my x86 assembly book (16-bit x86) from cover-to-cover many many times. Memorizing all the mnemonics, flags, registers, and common useful code patterns.

When I came back again, I could write x86 assembly, and I wrote a couple of viruses for DOS.

Then I just continued with it, going into normal programming, writing random software. Learning about operating systems and stuff.

Last couple of years I have taught myself how to write code for quantum computers. It was a bit more difficult, but it basically has a kind of almost-assembly language as well.

The book clerk was just dead wrong. The most wrong person I have ever met haha ?

[Daedalus]

Well, it's been a long road.

I graduated from High School in 1977 at the age of 17. We didn't have computers when I was a kid, I had no relatives who were involved with electronics of any kind. There were no electronics classes as electives in the High School I went to, either. There was, however, ONE math class that somehow had access to an S-100 bus 8080 machine with a teletype terminal (I think it was a Wang.) I didn't get to be in on that, as I wasn't ever in that class, however, I did see printouts of some BASIC programs from it, it was all printing a Christmas Tree of some kind with a program. What struck me was at the beginning, it set a variable to 3, then later in the same code, tested to see if it was over 5. This was impossible in my mind! That variable was set to 3! It can't ever be over 5, right?

6 months earlier, I had joined the US Navy in the "Delayed Entry" program. The minute I graduated from High School, I was off to San Diego for Basic Training. I enlisted as a "Machinist's Mate" with a specialty in Nuclear Power. Which meant that as soon as I finished Basic Training and Propulsion Engineering School, I went to Orlando Florida for Nuclear Power School. That's where I met my a math instructor, Petty Officer First Class Sorenson. I told him the story of the Variable that was set to 3, then was tested to see if it was over 5, and asked him why. He laughed and explained the concept of "state" that changes over time to me.

That's when it hit me like a ton of bricks. You could build a system... using electronics... programmed with an ever evolving state... THAT. COULD. DO. ANYTHING! Mind blown.

I spent the next 15 years moving from job to job in Silicon Valley building, testing, and designing electronics. I learned a lot. Along the way, I always had a computer of some stripe, the first one a TRS-80 Model 1 I got in 1978, followed by an Apple II I literally rescued from the E-waste bin at a swap meet, followed by an IBM compatible "Franken-Clone" made from the dodgiest parts ever found, Then a series of better, more legit IBM compatible computers I built myself from parts purchased from actual, reputable dealers.

In 1992, I discovered the "GEnie" service (Literally, General Electric... They let their computers be used as an online service after normal work hours.) I was playing a game called "Dragon's Gate" and struck up conversations with the SysOps and the owner, Mark Jacobs and he needed someone to write a PC client for the game. This was clearly the future, at least for me, so I jumped at the chance, and learned how to use Borland Turbo Pascal along with some graphics library that I bought. It worked, and well enough that he asked me to work... for actual money... to write an online client for another project. I accepted and that was that, I was now an Online Game Developer.

I worked for Mark until 2006, when I retired and moved to the woods in the middle of nowhere.

While retired, I studied Online Games from a more ... cerebral vantage point. I learned how to do Web Development, including Web-GL and WebSockets and realized... that... I hate Web development. In the words of Linus Pauling, "It's not even wrong."

I also dislike the direction that modern software development is going. I DO like developing indy games with OpenGL, but I don't like over arching do-it-all-for-you "game engines." I do like simple, discreet libraries, though, like the stb libs put out by Sean Barret. Games should be put out by small teams, and be GAMES, not excuses to dump money into graphics or pump an IP for it's last breath of dignity.

All of that has brought me to here. I would still like to get into robotics at some point... but dang, that's been a hard nut to crack.

Sorry to write such a book, but I think the bottom line of it after the preamble above is: Retro computing for me is a correction of where we SHOULD BE programming wise with where we are hardware wise, meaning that we need to back off of the wild, crazy software theories and realize that computers REALLY ARE just fast, accurate idiots with the intellect of an insect that will do exactly what we tell them, no more, no less. There is no magic bullet, there is no magic "productivity technique" other that hard work.

[neutrino]

On 12/5/2022 at 5:36 AM, Daedalus said:

I would still like to get into robotics at some point... but dang, that's been a hard nut to crack.

Since the Commander X16 have some influences from Commodore 64, maybe you could try these 1980s peripherals? ?

I/O card to control high currents for the Commodore 64 user port:

https://sleepingelephant.com/denial/wiki/index.php/VIC_REL

https://archive.org/details/VIC-REL_Manual_by_Handic/page/n1/mode/2up

Fischertechnik robot with Commodore 64 interface:

https://retroport.de/hardware-f-g/



https://homecomputerguy.de/2020/12/27/fischertechnik-robotor-am-c64/

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fischertechnik_Roboter_mit_C64_Interface.JPG

https://www.ftcommunity.de/bilderpool/modelle/roboter-industrieanlagen-computing/26114/

[Daedalus]

That's a pretty good idea, actually. My problem is that I over-reach. I come up with projects that require me to take on too many learning curves at once. That's manageable when someone else is footing the bill, and they can bring in additional expertise when needed, and it's manageable with software in that you just "add more time"... You don't have to buy more bits, or import special bits from another country.

I need to inventory the skills and tools I already have, and leverage that to make a project that's retro, cool, and within the scope of what I already know.

Well heck. That's easy. Remake the Radio Shack Armatron robot arm and use a Raspberry Pi with a touch screen to control it. I already have all the skills and tools I need for that... I even have the code already written to implement an OpenGL UI for it and connect it to an stm32 Nucleo board through a serial channel over USB. The only real learning curve that's new will be making the metal parts for the arm, but I can use off the shelf parts and minimally modify them through machining, like the 15mm extruded rails on that Technics model in the picture you posted. Actually, those might be plastic... but I'm sure I can find a supplier that can sell me whatever I need.

That would be super cool. The arm wouldn't even really have to be able to do anything useful... just having it wave at you would be enough. A subsequent project of replacing the Raspberry Pi with a Commander X16 when the boards become available would really retro it up. 

[KaiLikesToCode]

I was 5. My sister showed me scratch. When I was 6 I watched a python tutorial. Anyone can learn. Just watch a tutorial! Python is a good place to start.