Notes: 33209: Straits -- Booting Up

Notes for https://joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/2020/06/33209-straits-booting-up.html.

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Chapter 12: Storm Warnings, and Exercising Diskette Drives and Controllers

Chapter 13: Storms

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Working together on something that lets us talk about religion.

She needs to understand my culture, and I need to understand hers, etc.


Sat. Morning --


Need to realize the dependency on limited existing solutions because of lack of source code for Flex, here.


Then we got Julia's Micro Chroma out, and I checked her work. (NO I DON'T!)

"Looking good."

"I'm getting to where I feel pretty confident with what I'm doing."

I got out my tools and she got to work on finishing the daughterboard while I watched.

"You don't need to watch me."

"Spoil my fun."

"Quit that." She grinned. "Where are those packages your mom gave you yesterday?"

"Oh. Yeah. The operating system and the Forth."

"Fourth what?"

"Hang on."

I went into my room and brought out the two thick envelopes that had come the day before. I held up the one from Mountain View Press before opening it up.

The envelope contained two thick photocopied manuals, about two hundred pages total, and a cassette. One manual, with a kind of baby blue cover, was titled, APPLE II fig-FORTH INSTALLATION MANUAL AND ASSEMBLY SOURCE LISTING WITH GLOSSARY, and the other, with a pink cover, was titled fig-FORTH FOR 6800 ASSEMBLY SOURCE LISTING. The cassette was labeled fig-FORTH FOR 6800 ASSEMBLY SOURCE.

"Fig? Forth?" She looked at me suspiciously.

"Fig is a three letter acronym for Forth Interest Group."

"Forth from a fig leaf."

"Interesting," I raised my eyebrows with a wry smile, "because Forth is said to be close to the bare metal."

"Metal, as in music?"

I had to let out a quiet laugh. "Bare metal, as in speaking to the computer in machine language."

"Clearly an inside joke I'm not privy to." She gave me a discontented look.

"Okay, I thought we'd start with Flex, but it looks like we'll start with Forth."

"What's the difference?"

"Let's find out."

While she worked on the Micro Chroma, I read the fig-Forth manuals.

"You know," Julia paused after soldering a wire in place on the daughterboard. "We really do need to talk about religion."

I set the manuals down and searched her face. "Are you sure?"

"I've talked with my mom and my dad. Reverend Johansen has come over to talk while I've been over here, and  my parents are more than a little mad at him. I'm a little scared. Why does church have to be so important? You believe in Jesus, I believe in Jesus, isn't that good enough?"

"Joseph Smith talked with Jesus."

She picked up a spool of wire wrap wire,  measured and cut another length, stripped the ends, and soldered it into place.

"Have you?"

"Not exactly. I have talked with God, though."

"Prayer." She stared another.

"When you pray, does God answer?"

"Not always."

"Have you prayed about me, about which direction our relationship should take?"

"Sort-of. Not in so many words, maybe."

"We should both pray."

"Can we pray now?" She set the iron and the daughterboard down and took my hands, looking into my eyes.

"I'm already praying in my heart."

"What are your praying for?"

I almost said something I'd have regretted, but my tongue was held.

"Well?"

"The Spirit seems to tell me to let you pray first. Then I'll pray, and then, if you want, you can pray again. But we need to pray alone tonight because, while we're together, it's hard to see beyond the immediate."

We did so, and then we returned to what we were working on.

"So what do I need to know to become a Mormon?"

"Mormon was a prophet of God the Father, and of Jesus. I think he'd ask you how converted you are to Jesus."

She looked puzzled.

"I am culturally Mormon. Sort of. My parents are a bit non-conformist. You might want to become familiar with Mormon culture, or you might not. But becoming 'Mormon' in a sense of religion is not what either Mormon or I would advise."

"Outward church, inward church?"

"Maybe that's close enough."

"Wheat and tares?"

"Separate question."

She put her tools down again. "You can be so ... analytical ... exasperating." And she chuckled in resignation. "Where did I get that from?"

"It's not a word you'd use?"

"Not when I'm trying to convince this magnificent man to give me his heart."

"There's a problem. I'm not a magnificent man, but you have my heart."

"Then I can ask you to kiss me?"

I chuckled in agony and dropped my head. I breathed deeply, then turned to face Julia, my left knee touching her right. I took her hands and leaned forward, and we pressed our lips together, then drew apart.

(This experience was still five years away for the real me. Julia is, as I believe I have both mentioned and implied, a combination of several of the women I knew and several I counted as close friends. The plot of this fantasy won't allow the me of this story to wait for Helen to break my heart for good. So I need Julia in the story.)

"Ahem. Sorry to interrupt, but I need some help."

We turned in unison to look at Giselle.

She looked truly remorseful. "I'm stuck, and neither Dad nor Mom can't get me out."

We both went into Giselle's room and helped work out some problem she was having with a saved file that she couldn't get to read back in, then went back to the living room.


"Forth is interesting, but it won't help us program 6805s," I announced as we sat down.

Julia sighed. "Let's see if we can get my Micro Chroma to boot to the monitor prompt tonight."

"How's it coming?"

"Just a little more."

Shortly, she had the last wires in place. I gave it a visual check, and we plugged it in to the power supply in the Micro Chroma 68, and it booted up to the Monitor prompt. That was an excuse for a kiss, and then I plugged the Micro Chroma's keyboard in and she typed in some monitor commands which successfully returned results. And that was an excuse for another kiss.

"I think I should go call the missionaries and see if they can come over tomorrow morning. Explaining what joining the church means is their job."

"You used to be a missionary."

"True, but it's not my job any more. My job is now to be the best example I can, whatever that is."

"I think you're a pretty good example."

"Heh. I'll go call now. Ten or eleven tomorrow morning okay? It'll take six or seven visits with them, about an hour each visit.

"You'll be there, too?"

"Of course. That is definitely my job now."

She rewarded me with another kiss. "Are you going to pray about us tonight?"

"I pray about us every night, lately."

"Me, too."

*****

Instead, Julia listened patiently while I explained the program I needed to write, to generate generate a lot of pseudo-random data that would exercise the dark corners of my controller. Since the data produced by the program was deterministic, but with a distribution of values that resembled theoretical randomness, it could be recreated in the read pass, allowing me to test several times that what was written was the same as what the controller read back, without having to have a known good controller and a known good disk to compare with.

The program was done by the time I finished explaining it.

Then I borrowed Giselle's computer just long enough to write the initial read test disk on the CoCo. That took about ten minutes, and Giselle and Julia and Dad and Mom chatted in the kitchen while I worked.

I got the Micro Chroma 68 set up to read and check what it read in an endless cycle, counting the number of errors. I set it up to retry on errors, and to count the number of retries, and the number of times a retry did not get a good read.

With the exerciser routine started, we had a little scripture study, chasing down the concept of stewardship relative to revelation and commandments.

Then I drove Julia home. And we kissed each other on the cheeks, because we didn't want to risk anything more.






"Which is most interesting?" I asked, semi-rhetorically, raising my eyebrows as I sat back down.

She pouted. "Disk operating system, or whichever it is you need to be able to use the 6805 tools Ms. Steward left us. But now that I've said that, you're going to make me wait."

"Now why would I do that?" I chuckled as I picked up the package from TSC. "This would be Flex, and the compilers."

The package contained several diskettes and manuals. "Flex disk, manual. Additional utilities. Pascal compiler and manual, and Tiny C compiler and manual. Advanced Programmers Guide."

"They don't look all that special."

"Heh. Let's see if I can find a good place to get a toehold." I scanned through the Flex manual and the utility manual first, to get an overview, then scanned through the installation hints.

"Hmm."

"What?"

"I've got to write some glue code. It looks like setting this thing up to replace the

Has to put code where Flex expects it. Replacing the monitor requires mapping the monitor out after boot.

Mapping the monitor, reset to on-board monitor on POR but not on RESET.

Need to be able to switch the disks to FM? Or TSC fixed that?

Terminal I/O routines
Disk I/O routines






  before getting Julia's Micro Chroma out. I checked her work, and she started back in on the wiring while I dug into the datasheets for the TMS 9900 and TMS 9940.

Chapter 13: what?

TOC

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[Backed up at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/06/bk-33209-storms.html.]