3 ms·
My father had one of these back in the day for the BBC Micro. I remember struggling with painfully slow screen dump routines (for printing an image of the scre
by david-given 8y ago
My father had one of these back in the day for the BBC Micro.
I remember struggling with painfully slow screen dump routines (for printing an image of the screen onto paper) before someone had the insight that by printing the images sideways you could read a byte of horizontal scanline data from memory and throw it directly at the printer, which treated it as a vertical column of dots; this meant you didn't need the painfully expensive step of rotating each 8x8 character cell.
Simple in hindsight, but it took ages to realise, and made screen dumps so much simpler and faster.
- gaius 8y agoI still have one here. Manually inserting control codes in Wordwise Plus! So much more satisfying than any modern word processor.
- Theodores 8y agoClassic combination - BBC Micro and MX-80. Seems you were hacking yours differently to what I was doing. I acquired some army headed letter (UK), or rather 'stole'. With it I forged a letter with my MX-80 to trick a friend's parent to pop into the army recruitment centre. This friend's parent had skived off National Service many aeons ago and I pranked him into going back to account for himself. The letter 'had to be legit' because it wasn't hand typed. So easily fooled. The things you do as a small child that you would never do as an adult.
- biggusdickus 8y agoYou'd go to bloody prison for 20 years now for things we did in 80ies/early 90ies