The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Z80’ Category

For the USA, the TRS-80 PC-1 was the “The Trash Computer That Became Your Phone”; the rest of the world could enjoy the hardware identical Sharp PC-1210/1211/1212 years earlier

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/11/25

Earlier this year, I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] The Trash Computer That Became Your Phone – YouTube which discusses the Tandy  TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1, . The video includes a lot of history about Tandy Corporation, Charles Tandy and Radio Shack including quite a few bits I didn’t know yet.

It was part of the Tandy Pocket Computer, and succeeded by the Z80 powered TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-2 (which was actually a rebadged Sharp PC-1500).

The TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1 itself was also a rebadged Pocket Computer, this time a Sharp PC-1211 powered by a duo of 4-bit CPUs so totally incompatible with the PC-2. Actually none of the Tandy Pocket Computer line were compatible with each other (nor with the desktop TRS-80 which itself was incompatible TRS-80 Color Computer). With the PC-4 and on Tandy even switched to Casio as manufacturer, then back to Sharp for the final PC-8.

Anyway: this video was a trip down memory lane and reliving my 2012 blog post The calculators that got me into programming (via: calculators : Algorithms for the masses – julian m bucknall), and I was glad that by now there are more videos covering the calculator I started with, for instance via [Wayback/Archive] sharp pc-1211 – YouTube:

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Event, History, Z80 | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Much Turbo Pascal history (via What is a Delphi DCU file? – Stack Overflow)

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/19

Editing [WayBack] What is a Delphi DCU file? – Stack Overflow for more historic correctness and adding links prompted me to archive some older material and search for some more, basically because while historically very relevant, link rot makes a lot of that stuff harder and harder to find.

The legendary full page colour advert published in the 12th 1983 issue of Byte Magazine on page 456 is at the bottom of this post (Many BYTE magaine issues have been archived at https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine).

The smaller version below is from WayBack: Sip from the Firehose : November 2008 marks the 25th anniversary of Turbo Pascal v1.0! (this article is not available on the Embarcadero or Idera site any more).

I also included more adverts in reverse chronological order at the end:

The last two via [WayBack] saundby.com: Software for the Ampro Little Board.

--jeroen

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, CP/M, Delphi, Development, Event, History, MS-DOS, Pascal, Power User, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, UCSD Pascal, Z80 | Leave a Comment »

Computing History – The UK Computer Museum – Cambridge

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/19

On my places to visit:

The Centre for Computing History is a computer museum based in Cambridge, UK. With a collection of vintage computers and game consoles, many of the exhibits are hands on and interactive.

[WayBack] Computing History – The UK Computer Museum – Cambridge.

When I bumped into it, this was their collection size, ranging from the 1960s until recent history:

Archive Statistics :

  • Computers = 993
  • Peripherals = 1446
  • Mobile Devices = 31
  • Game Consoles = 213
  • Video Games = 10259
  • Software Packages = 2605
  • Books = 2045
  • Manuals = 4106
  • Magazines = 9057

Looking at their archived brands (having [WayBack] MITS – Altair and [WayBack] Raspberry Pi in the collection) is such a joy.

Archiving the older parts is a tough job, as they stem from way before the web era, so information has been lost, parts are hard to source, a lot of hardware got thrown away or is hard to find at all, people have died. More on that at [WayBack] About – Computing History.

Without a physical visit, you can find what they have at [WayBack] Search Our Archive – Computing History.

The video below on their archive is impressive.

–jeroen

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Posted in 6502, 68k, Apple I, BBC Micro B, BBS, C64, Commodore, CP/M, dial-up modems, FidoNet, History, IBM SAA CUA, PowerPC, Tesseract, VIC-20, Z80 | Leave a Comment »

Delphi ^A syntax: Documented, implied, or undocumented? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/12/12

The syntax is documented. In the Turbo Pasal 3 documentation, i.e. the Z80 era.

Source my answer to [WayBack] Delphi ^A syntax: Documented, implied, or undocumented? – Stack Overflow (I have added some WayBack Internet Archive links below) as it is from the Turbo Pascal era where the caret was introduced to support control characters:

This is from long ago as an escape character to enable you to have consts for control characters in a more readable way.
const
  CtrlC = ^C;
begin
  Write(Ord(CtrlC));
end.

This defines a Char constant with value #3, then writes 3 in Borland Pascal 7, and I remember seeing it years before that too.

I just checked the Turbo Pascal 5.0 and Borland Pascal 7.0 languages guides, but could not find it, so it seems undocumented.

Edit: I do remember this was a Borland thing, and just [WayBack] checked: it is not part of the ISO Pascal standard (formerly this was ANSI Pascal Standard, thanks Sertac for noticing this).

It [WayBack] is documented in the Free Pascal documentation [WayBack].

SGI uses the backslash as escape character, as per their docs [WayBack].

More Edit: I found it [WayBack] documented in Delphi in a Nutshell and the [WayBack] Delphi Basics site.

Found it: Just found it on page 37 of the Turbo Pascal 3 Reference Manual [WayBack].

(Marco van de Voort found the Free Pascal documentation)

It in fact originates in the 1984 Turbo Pascal 1 edition, as per the [WayBack] Turbo_Pascal_Reference_Manual_Feb84.pdf:

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Posted in Borland Pascal, Delphi, Development, FreePascal, History, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, Z80 | 1 Comment »

6502 emulation: the ICE, or in-circuit-emulator…

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/05

On my list of hardware things to try:

[WayBack] a different take on 6502 emulation: the ICE, or in-circuit-emulator… – mos6502 – Google+

Basically it consists of three parts:

 

–jeroen

 

Posted in 6502, Development, Hardware Development, History, Z80 | Leave a Comment »

Recent bitsaver entries on Z80 assembly, CPM and concurrent Pascal

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/26

–jeroen

Posted in Assembly Language, CP/M, Development, History, Software Development, Z80 | Leave a Comment »

Turbo Pascal Compiler and IDE in JavaScript

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/07/09

A (hardly) limited Turbo Pascal Compiler (and large parts of the IDE!) in JavaScript.

Memories from the CP/M era (:

Code is on GitHub.

–jeroen

Posted in CP/M, Development, History, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, Z80 | Leave a Comment »