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It's getting so Fridays are as bad as Mondays. Oh, wait, I know why. The library is short of staff on both of those days. Also short on Saturday but since I rarely work on a Saturday I don't experience that.
Two more weeks of summer reading madness and then it will (I hope) quiet down. Screaming kids, mountains of unshelved books (most of which are the very skinny picture book kind that are the hardest to shelve,) and various "entertainment" so that it seems as if something is going on every day. More like a circus than a library, I'd say.
I've now got one more stable antiquated computer emulation going pretty well. This is the TRS-80 for Model III, 4, and 4P. The Model III was the first computer I ever owned myself. I later upgraded to a 4P and Gary bought one as well to replace his "GIMIX Ghost" (a Motorola 6800-based card cage, SS-50 bus.) The Model III is long gone, as are the stack of Compupro 8/16 systems we had for a while. The GIMIX is still here somewhere, probably wrapped in plastic out on the garage shelves along with the two 4P's and my Amiga 2000. Actually, we should look into that GIMIX thing. I saw an SWTPC, very similar to the Ghost, selling for almost $3000 this week as a "museum piece." Those are non-CP/M 8-bit computers from the late 70s, earlier than the S-100 bus machines like IMSAI that really started the home computing hobby off.
I've been digging around for original software diskettes from the TRS-80 machines, and found some of them. Chances are they can't be read any more, though. Fortunately, much of the later software I used and loved was placed in the public domain by the copyright holder (hat tip and a hoof click to Roy Soltoff, though I did legitimately buy most of his stuff anyway when it was still marketable.) There are virtual disk images or zip files of that stuff available online, including probably the best macro assembler and C compiler ever created for the TRS-80 line up. I also had Microsoft Fortran (F80, just a direct port of the CP/M version) and Tandy Pascal (a p-code system that was, I believe, based off the old Alcor Pascal.) I'm hoping to recover those, either from the original floppies, or from the external hard drive I used with the 4P (the latter is more likely, but requires me to get the old hardware unpacked and running again.) That would give me a chance to dump the 4P ROM image as well, which isn't available otherwise as it seems but can be used in the emulator to get a more complete 4P system going.
You may laugh about "Trash 80" and if you ever saw the original Model I you'd be at least partly correct, but the 4/4P hardware and software was extremely sophisticated, able to rival MS-DOS in many respects and even surpass it. This in spite of running only on a Z80 processor, rather than a 16 or 32-bit CPU. The model 4 series was able to shift between half a dozen operating systems, read many different disk formats (including the MS-DOS floppies as well as 8-inch CP/M disks,) and run standard word processing, spreadsheet, and database software of the time. I used mine to operate dialup bulletin board systems, drive high quality printers, and even HP color plotters. Just before I retired it in favor of the Amiga, I was using it for radioteletype and packet radio by linking it to a dedicated radio terminal.
Well, it turns out that the hay shifting and unloading didn't make either of us as stiff and sore as we expected, though it sure did tire us out. I think 240 bales in one day is probably as much as we've ever done. Maybe we aren't as old as we think. Nah, can't be.
Two more weeks of summer reading madness and then it will (I hope) quiet down. Screaming kids, mountains of unshelved books (most of which are the very skinny picture book kind that are the hardest to shelve,) and various "entertainment" so that it seems as if something is going on every day. More like a circus than a library, I'd say.
I've now got one more stable antiquated computer emulation going pretty well. This is the TRS-80 for Model III, 4, and 4P. The Model III was the first computer I ever owned myself. I later upgraded to a 4P and Gary bought one as well to replace his "GIMIX Ghost" (a Motorola 6800-based card cage, SS-50 bus.) The Model III is long gone, as are the stack of Compupro 8/16 systems we had for a while. The GIMIX is still here somewhere, probably wrapped in plastic out on the garage shelves along with the two 4P's and my Amiga 2000. Actually, we should look into that GIMIX thing. I saw an SWTPC, very similar to the Ghost, selling for almost $3000 this week as a "museum piece." Those are non-CP/M 8-bit computers from the late 70s, earlier than the S-100 bus machines like IMSAI that really started the home computing hobby off.
I've been digging around for original software diskettes from the TRS-80 machines, and found some of them. Chances are they can't be read any more, though. Fortunately, much of the later software I used and loved was placed in the public domain by the copyright holder (hat tip and a hoof click to Roy Soltoff, though I did legitimately buy most of his stuff anyway when it was still marketable.) There are virtual disk images or zip files of that stuff available online, including probably the best macro assembler and C compiler ever created for the TRS-80 line up. I also had Microsoft Fortran (F80, just a direct port of the CP/M version) and Tandy Pascal (a p-code system that was, I believe, based off the old Alcor Pascal.) I'm hoping to recover those, either from the original floppies, or from the external hard drive I used with the 4P (the latter is more likely, but requires me to get the old hardware unpacked and running again.) That would give me a chance to dump the 4P ROM image as well, which isn't available otherwise as it seems but can be used in the emulator to get a more complete 4P system going.
You may laugh about "Trash 80" and if you ever saw the original Model I you'd be at least partly correct, but the 4/4P hardware and software was extremely sophisticated, able to rival MS-DOS in many respects and even surpass it. This in spite of running only on a Z80 processor, rather than a 16 or 32-bit CPU. The model 4 series was able to shift between half a dozen operating systems, read many different disk formats (including the MS-DOS floppies as well as 8-inch CP/M disks,) and run standard word processing, spreadsheet, and database software of the time. I used mine to operate dialup bulletin board systems, drive high quality printers, and even HP color plotters. Just before I retired it in favor of the Amiga, I was using it for radioteletype and packet radio by linking it to a dedicated radio terminal.
Well, it turns out that the hay shifting and unloading didn't make either of us as stiff and sore as we expected, though it sure did tire us out. I think 240 bales in one day is probably as much as we've ever done. Maybe we aren't as old as we think. Nah, can't be.
