> Yeah, know it well. My first computer was an IMSAI (Altair clone). Had
> it hooked up to a military-style teletype and paper tape reader, but had
> to load bootstrap by hand byte by byte with the toggles before it would
> recognize the paper tape. After bootstrap we had wild Bill's original
> MS BASIC on paper tape. Those were the days, 3500 bytes for BASIC, and
> thrilled to get that. Perfect for "Hunt the Wumpus" <g>
>
Well as long as we are fondly remembering our first computers...
I had a Netronics ELF II (1802 CPU) with 256 Bytes of ram that I built
from a kit. Then came 2 4-K boards built from kits, and finally a I/O
board. The ELF actually had a video chip that would do 128x64 pixels
graphics on a TV. I finally entered Tom Pitmans Tiny Basic (all 2 or 3K
of it) using the builtin hex keypad and 2-digit hex display. Tiny basic
used the video chips high res 128x64 pixel display for output and an ascii
kayboard wired in to an 8 bit input port.
Only problem is I had no ascii keyboard so I patched basic to use the hex
keypad. Armed with a ASCII hex chart away I went! After a few months I
really knew the hex codes for an ASCII keyboard.
I was so envyous of my dad's freinds that had those nice IMSAI's and
SWTP's.
Now thats programming!