5 ms·
In 1980 as a math grad student, I took out my bank's first student loan for a computer, $3000 ($9000 now) for an Apple II. My annual stipend was not much more.
by Syzygies 4y ago
In 1980 as a math grad student, I took out my bank's first student loan for a computer, $3000 ($9000 now) for an Apple II. My annual stipend was not much more. My branch of math at that time was a foot race with no rule against bicycles (they hardly knew what one was) and I saw computerizing my field as an alternative to dropping out. The Apple II didn't really help here; later we managed to bit-squeeze a viable computer algebra system [1] onto the first 128K Macintosh, leading to colleague adoption. Other friends got their start in computing, learning how to program the Apple II in my apartment.
One could learn the Apple II inside-out. I've never had that experience again. My first week I took a soldering iron to it to provide lower case support; I've been the surgeon for friends' computers ever since. There was a book (it must be somewhere on this archive) that explained the purpose of every byte in low memory.
For perspective, I was avidly learning Go as I started grad school, till I read on the back cover of one of James Davies' books that he had dropped out of math grad school to pursue Go. Ouch! The Apple II was a completely different, more approachable scale. I could master it and stay in grad school.
[1] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/Macaulay/ https://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/Macaulay/
- derekja 4y agowhat’s where in the apple. https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=67D333F6D1B0AA52E261459FEBA4C751 https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=67D333F6D1B0AA52E261459... I also had that experience and credit the deep understanding of an early system with intuition in rapidly understanding modern systems.
- Syzygies 4y agoYes! That was the book.
- js2 4y ago> My first week I took a soldering iron to it to provide lower case support I had (still have actually...) an Apple ][ thus modified but I don't recall soldering anything inside the computer being necessary. It required running a jumper from the shift key to the paddle input. https://archive.org/details/II_II-Shift-Key_Modification https://archive.org/details/II_II-Shift-Key_Modification This didn't actually display lowercase though, just allowed you to input it. To display it required replacing the character set generator chip which I think was on the keyboard PBC, but I'm not sure about as mine had an entirely swapped out keyboard PCB with one that had macro support.
- dhosek 4y agoYeah, I think that the 8-bit computers were the last ones that a single person could understand completely at every level. I can just about decipher modern assembly language to be able to compare outputs of godbolt when considering whether an optimization does what I think it does, but beyond that, I’ve not actually written any assembly code for over 30 years (the last I did was 370 Assembler on an IBM minicomputer). I remember reading computer magazines back in the 80s where they were discussing approaches to getting upper and lower case on the Apple ][. I had made the mistake of using the ctrl key which meant that return and backspace no longer worked and an article suggested using esc instead. The shift to the paddle button option wasn’t an option for me since I never owned my own computer and relied on being able to stay after school to use the school's computers to learn with.
- spc476 4y agoI think the 16-bit computers could be understood as well---the original Mac, Atari ST, Amiga and IBM PC [1]. I have the IBM technical manuals for the IBM PC (XT I think? Maybe AT?) and the IBM PCjr and they are complete, with BIOS listings and schematics. I also have Amiga Reference manuals (three volumes, includes how to use, what to use, and hardware information). I do agree however, that once you got past 1990 or so, things started getting way more complex. [1] Even though the 8088 had an 8-bit bus, internally it was still 16 bits.
- anewpersonality 4y agoGet into arduino/maker community.