[JMR202001151918: Backup]
Chapter 2: Christmas Present -- Micro Chroma 68
Chapter 3: School
With permission from Rusty Crane and Thomson Bright, the teachers in the Electronic Data Drocessing (now Information Science) department, I added a BASIC programming class to my winter schedule, to prepare for when we got the keyboards and had the Micro Chroma all wired up and running.
I had gotten an introduction to BASIC previously, in my high school industrial electronics class. And I'd had more time to get familiar with it after high school when I was working for Radio Shack in Odessa, and then in Salt Lake, working on demo units of the original model 1 of the TRS-80. So I was familiar with the commands and syntax, and had a head start on all the programming projects. That would keep the class from eating up much of my time.
The school counselor consulted with the school administration and teachers, and BASIC was accepted as one substitute class in my electronics coursework.
For the first few weeks in the BASIC course, we used punched cards for programs and data. Then the school made room for us on a disk drive somewhere, and we each got 4K of storage. I got a little spoiled, running BASIC on the mainframe. I may still have some of those punched card decks stored somewhere.
For English coursework, they let me skip the freshman review of grammar because I had good grades from high school, and I substituted a literature class that was mostly reading and book reports.
That left me needing some freshman-level writing component credit, so I took a research lab, to practice research and bibliography techniques.
"Konnichi wa."
"Eh? What?" Atsuko looked up from the table in the writing lab in surprise.
"Aren't you Japanese? Ms. Howell said you were Japanese."
"Well, yeah, but I'm here to practice English."
"Good. I'm taking a research and writing lab for practice. If you have any questions, maybe I can help. I'm pretty good with grammar and stuff."
"Thanks. But English only, okay?"
"You got it."
"'I got it?' What's that mean?"
"Heh." I had to think. Since answering in Japanese was already stated to be not helpful, I couldn't just say, "Ossharu tōri," or "Ryōkai." But the latter translated back to English seemed possible.
"Okay."
"Okay? What's okay?
"'You got it.' is close to 'Okay.' in meaning."
"Hmmm. You got it." She looked at me in puzzlement. "No. Not okay. It doesn't make sense."
"Oh. So you don't see it."
"No, I don't see it."
"You don't get it."
"No, I don't ... get ... it." She thought for a minute. "'I get it.' means I understand."
"True." I raised my eyebrows, because I was just as surprised that she saw it as she was.
"So 'You get it.' means 'You understand.' Right?"
I nodded. "Nice."
She nodded. "Except that I would never say, in Japanese, 'Anata ga wakatta, ne.' in this situation. It would be rude."
I bit my lip. She was right. "But, ... no Japanese?"
She shook her head.
"No fair."
"Oh, okay, just this once."
"Wakatta ja nai desu ka?"
"No. Definitely not that. Not here."
"One more?"
She sighed. "Okay, if you insist."
"Nozomareru tōri ni shite ageru."
"That's not Japanese."
I raised my eyebrows, but she shook her head.
"I would not say it."
"Okay. Anyway, I was trying to tell you I would give you what you want. That's what okay would mean, right?"
"Hmm." After a few moments of thought, she nodded. "Okay, I get what I asked for. Maybe I get it. It just feels like 'Zama miro!'"
I sighed and rubbed my forehead. "You've got a point there. But it's not rude in English."
She was cute, but during the winter term, at times when we were both finished with studies and just talking, she made it clear that she had a boyfriend already.
So I grinned and said he was lucky.
I took an easy statistics class that didn't get into the calculus of statistics. Not much to say about it yet, except that we had a bunch of students who figured out how to have fun with the experiments and a teacher who thought students learning while having fun was great.
The AC circuits and digital circuits classes both felt entirely like review and lab practice, but now, with the prototyping board, I had plenty to do outside of classes, so I didn't mind. Also, I probably needed the practice with complex circuit analysis. Node analysis requires a bit of familiarity, but I had time to get it. Had to brush up on the DC analysis a bit, too.
Across several nights after school, after delivering newspapers and collecting the customers' subscription money, I wired the BASIC ROM socket pins into the circuit. It was a 4 kilobyte ROM, assembled to start at address hexadecimal C000. (Motorola chose the convention of indicating hexadecimal numbers with the dollar sign, so C000sixteen would be written $C000 in their documents and code, and that's the convention I'll use from here.) I checked the wiring carefully, and then powered it up. The monitor prompt showed, so at least the ROM was not causing bus conflicts or such.
I have found that there are many problems that look hard at first, but after I have some time to just let them sit in my head, when I come back to them I can work them out. Shorting the keyboard input was one of those. I just needed to short the ASCII code into the PIA port, 1s through a resistor to +5V power, and 0s direct to 0V ground, then hit the strobe input, once for each fake keypress.
It would be electrically cleaner to have each pin separately tied high through 100 kilo-ohm resistors, then just short the 0s low, but that was a fair amount of work, and had the additional risk of longer stretches of wire to cause unwanted shorts. And if I were going that far, why not latch the lines? I decided not to go down that path until I tried the easy approach, with one common resistor to +5V.
I wrote down the combinations of lows and highs for the monitor command to jump into the BASIC ROM at address $C000:
G: 1000000 (71 -- $47) bit 6 high, the rest low.It took several tries, because the strobe wire tended to bounce electrically, typing the same character several times in a row. When that happened, I'd have to hit the reset button. But, after several tries, I succeeded in starting the BASIC interpreter:
C: 1000011 (67 -- $43) bits 6, 1, and 0 high, the rest low.
0: 0110000 (51 -- $33) bits 6 and 5 high, the rest low.
0: 0110000 (same)
0: 0110000 (same)
enter: 0001100 (12 -- $0C) bits 3 and 2 high, the rest low.
TINY BASIC FOR MOTOROLA 6800
VERSION 4.2
COPYLEFT
OK
(In the real world, I didn't try this before we got the keyboards connected and working. But BASIC did come up immediately.)
I thought that was cool. Denny took the news enthusiastically, too.
Fred Burns from the other ward stopped me to talk in the hall between wards. (We had two wards of the church in Odessa, both meeting in the old chapel that is now part of the Bowie Middle School campus.)
"So, Joe, how's school? Classes coming together?"
"It's coming together okay, eh, ..."
"Fred Burns. Get the classes you wanted?"
"Pretty much, Br. Burns. I'd thought I'd try to finish the associates' degree in a year, but my brother talked me into slowing down so I'd have time for other things."
"Call me Fred. Your father tells me you're building a microcomputer."
"Well, yeah. My brother got me a prototyping kit from Motorola, where he works."
"Motorola. That would have the 68000 in it, then?"
"The 68000 would be cool, but we're starting easy with the 6800."
"I see. What do you plan to do with it?"
"Use it in classes for now. It has BASIC in ROM, so I can use it for a programmable calculator, and I'll probably be doing lab work for some of my electronics classes with it. Are you interested in microcomputers, too?"
"Not as a hobby, I get enough of computers at work."
"Oh. You work in computers?"
"I'm a computer technician for the local IBM office. Have you heard about IBM's summer internships?"
"No, can't say that I have."
"You should apply, get some experience and money."
"How would I do that?"
He laughed. "You know, I should've asked before I mentioned it. I'll check."
We talked a bit more, and agreed to talk again soon.
Chapter 4: Micro Chroma 68 Lives
[Backed up at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/01/bk-33209-school.html.]
[JMR202001151918: End.]
[JMR202001132013: Backup]
Christmas Present -- Micro Chroma 68
Chapter 3: School
With permission from Rusty Crane and Thomson Bright, the teachers in the Electronic Data Drocessing (now Information Science) department, I added a BASIC programming class to my winter schedule, to prepare for when we got the keyboards and had the Micro Chroma all wired up and running.
I had gotten an introduction to BASIC previously, in my high school industrial electronics class. And I'd had more time to get familiar with it after high school when I was working for Radio Shack in Odessa, and then in Salt Lake, working on demo units of the original model 1 of the TRS-80. So I was familiar with the commands and syntax, and had a head start on all the programming projects. That would keep the class from eating up much of my time.
The school counselor consulted with the school administration and teachers, and BASIC was accepted as one substitute class in my electronics coursework.
For the first few weeks in the BASIC course, we used punched cards for programs and data. Then the school made room for us on a disk drive somewhere, and we each got 4K of storage. I got a little spoiled, running BASIC on the mainframe. I may still have some of those punched card decks stored somewhere.
For English coursework, they let me skip the freshman review of grammar because I had good grades from high school, and I substituted a literature class that was mostly reading and book reports.
That left me needing some freshman-level writing component credit, so I took a research lab, to practice research and bibliography techniques.
"Konnichi wa."
"Eh? What?" Atsuko looked up from the table in the writing lab in surprise.
"Aren't you Japanese? Ms. Howell said you were Japanese."
"Well, yeah, but I'm here to practice English."
"Good. I'm taking a research and writing lab for practice. If you have any questions, maybe I can help. I'm pretty good with grammar and stuff."
"Thanks. But English only, okay?"
"You got it."
"'I got it?' What's that mean?"
"Heh." I had to think. Since answering in Japanese was already stated to be not helpful, I couldn't just say, "Ossharu tōri," or "Ryōkai." But the latter translated back to English seemed possible.
"Okay."
"Okay? What's okay?
"'You got it.' is close to 'Okay.' in meaning."
"Hmmm. You got it." She looked at me in puzzlement. "No. Not okay. It doesn't make sense."
"Oh. So you don't see it."
"No, I don't see it."
"You don't get it."
"No, I don't ... get ... it." She thought for a minute. "'I get it.' means I understand."
"True." I raised my eyebrows, because I was just as surprised that she saw it as she was.
"So 'You get it.' means 'You understand.' Right?"
I nodded. "Nice."
She nodded. "Except that I would never say, in Japanese, 'Anata ga wakatta, ne.' in this situation. It would be rude."
I bit my lip. She was right. "But, ... no Japanese?"
She shook her head.
"No fair."
"Oh, okay, just this once."
"Wakatta ja nai desu ka?"
"No. Definitely not that. Not here."
"One more?"
She sighed. "Okay, if you insist."
"Nozomareru tōri ni shite ageru."
"That's not Japanese."
I raised my eyebrows, but she shook her head.
"I would not say it."
"Okay. Anyway, I was trying to tell you I would give you what you want. That's what okay would mean, right?"
"Hmm." After a few moments of thought, she nodded. "Okay, I get what I asked for. Maybe I get it. It just feels like 'Zama miro!'"
I sighed and rubbed my forehead. "You've got a point there. But it's not rude in English."
She was cute, but during the winter term, at times when we were both finished with studies and just talking, she made it clear that she had a boyfriend already.
So I grinned and said he was lucky.
I took an easy statistics class that didn't get into the calculus of statistics. Not much to say about it yet, except that we had a bunch of students who figured out how to have fun with the experiments and a teacher who thought students learning while having fun was great.
The AC circuits and digital circuits classes both felt entirely like review and lab practice, but now, with the prototyping board, I had plenty to do outside of classes, so I didn't mind. Also, I probably needed the practice with complex circuit analysis. Node analysis requires a bit of familiarity, but I had time to get it. Had to brush up on the DC analysis a bit, too.
Across several nights after school, after delivering newspapers and collecting the customers' subscription money, I wired the BASIC ROM socket pins into the circuit. It was a 4 kilobyte ROM, assembled to start at address hexadecimal C000. (Motorola chose the convention of indicating hexadecimal numbers with the dollar sign, so C000sixteen would be written $C000 in their documents and code, and that's the convention I'll use from here.) I checked the wiring carefully, and then powered it up. The monitor prompt showed, so at least the ROM was not causing bus conflicts or such.
I have found that there are many problems that look hard at first, but after I have some time to just let them sit in my head, when I come back to them I can work them out. Shorting the keyboard input was one of those. I just needed to short the ASCII code into the PIA port, 1s through a resistor to +5V power, and 0s direct to 0V ground, then hit the strobe input, once for each fake keypress.
It would be electrically cleaner to have each pin separately tied high through 100 kilo-ohm resistors, then just short the 0s low, but that was a fair amount of work, and had the additional risk of longer stretches of wire to cause unwanted shorts. And if I were going that far, why not latch the lines? I decided not to go down that path until I tried the easy approach, with one common resistor to +5V.
I wrote down the combinations of lows and highs for the monitor command to jump into the BASIC ROM at address $C000:
G: 1000000 (71 -- $47) bit 6 high, the rest low.It took several tries, because the strobe wire tended to bounce electrically, typing the same character several times in a row. When that happened, I'd have to hit the reset button. But, after several tries, I succeeded in starting the BASIC interpreter:
C: 1000011 (67 -- $43) bits 6, 1, and 0 high, the rest low.
0: 0110000 (51 -- $33) bits 6 and 5 high, the rest low.
0: 0110000 (same)
0: 0110000 (same)
enter: 0001100 (12 -- $0C) bits 3 and 2 high, the rest low.
TSC MICRO BASIC PLUS
COPYRIGHT 1976
TECHNICAL SYSTEMS CONSULTANTS
!
(In the real world, I didn't try this before we got the keyboards connected and working. But BASIC did come up immediately.)
I thought that was cool. Denny took the news enthusiastically, too.
Fred Burns from the other ward stopped me to talk in the hall between wards. (We had two wards of the church in Odessa, both meeting in the old chapel that is now part of the Bowie Middle School campus.)
"So, Joe, how's school? Classes coming together?"
"It's coming together okay, eh, ..."
"Fred Burns. Get the classes you wanted?"
"Pretty much, Br. Burns. I'd thought I'd try to finish the associates' degree in a year, but my brother talked me into slowing down so I'd have time for other things."
"Call me Fred. Your father tells me you're building a microcomputer."
"Well, yeah. My brother got me a prototyping kit from Motorola, where he works."
"Motorola. That would have the 68000 in it, then?"
"The 68000 would be cool, but we're starting easy with the 6800."
"I see. What do you plan to do with it?"
"Use it in classes for now. It has BASIC in ROM, so I can use it for a programmable calculator, and I'll probably be doing lab work for some of my electronics classes with it. Are you interested in microcomputers, too?"
"Not as a hobby, I get enough of computers at work."
"Oh. You work in computers?"
"I'm a computer technician for the local IBM office. Have you heard about IBM's summer internships?"
"No, can't say that I have."
"You should apply, get some experience and money."
"How would I do that?"
He laughed. "You know, I should've asked before I mentioned it. I'll check."
We talked a bit more, and agreed to talk again soon.
Chapter 4: Micro Chroma 68 Lives
[Backed up at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/01/bk-33209-school.html.]
[JMR202001132013: End.]
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