heath.com performance feedback...
Craig, hearth.com is working great for me at this time. Much, much improved over the last couple days.
(aside)
Wow. I'm in good computer company here.
I have a TRS PC-1 handheld, 1980 model (or so). 1.4k of main memory with an abbreviated BASIC interpreter. All instructions were limited to 3 chars. It has a special printer caddy with a single line, 16 character thermal printer and a 300 BAUD serial cassette tape deck secondary storage. Not sure how much one of those tapes held. They always failed before I filled 'em up.
I may have been the first student to ever 'check my calculus function test answers' using a hand held 'calculator'. Hee-hee. Still had to show my work, though, so I didn't feel like I was cheating.
I've also got one of the original red LED TI-1000 calculators from the 1970's (I believe). The 3 is non-functional... doh!
In 1980 I learned how to program an IBM 4341 System 360 (Mainframe) using IBM's Macro Assembler Language Compiler (ALC) and punch cards. Hoo-wee! We all dropped a stack at one time or another and proceeded to play an extended game of solitare with a 1000 card deck. Or we buggered up the edges of that 2 lb pack to where they couldn't be read. I still have my handy dandy System 360/370 Programmers reference card (actually a tiny little yellow book) that spelled out the EBCDIC code in binary, graphics chars that look like cuniaform writing, and other mysteries of the IBM universe. Anybody remember binary two's compliment, shift right/left register, packed decimal data format (1234567D -- that's a packed full-word
, SOC4's and SOC7's, reading core dumps to find SOC1's (out of your pgm's memory area exceptions--oh dear god, not a SOC1--thank god for Abend Aid dump reading software) or laying out hard drive storage blocks, tracks, and cylinders for ISAM files and hash tables? Uhg! I spent 3 years programming that stuff on my first programming job back in 1985. No single programming term could be greater than 8 chars. Made a man of me, though.
Hey BB, I'll bet you used those old 8" Tandy floppies with single sided 180k storage. Or was it double sided and 360k? Inquiring minds want to know...