Backup: 33209: Headwinds -- Differences

Backup of https://joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/2020/03/33209-headwinds-differences.html.

---

[JMR202004022021 -- major edits:]

Chapter 11.2: Headwinds -- Differences

"Cisneros residence, what can we do you for?"

"Uh, hello, Mr. Cisneros. This is Joe Reeves. I'd like to speak with Julia, if I could."

"Julia, somebody who says he is Joe Reeves wants to know if he can talk with you."

I could her Julia's voice in the background, but I couldn't tell what she was saying.

"Yes." Her father's voice was turned away from the phone.

More of her voice in the background.

"No."

Still more of her voice, mixed with her mother's voice.

"Don't ask me." He paused again before his voice returned to the phone. "Okay, you're in luck today. She says she'll talk to you."

"Dad, give me that phone!" This time her voice was distinct, though somewhat distant.

"Thank you."

I heard sounds of the phone changing hands, with Julia's father's chuckle in the background.

"Hi Joe."

I was still chuckling, myself.

"Don't laugh. You'll just encourage him."

"My dad gets on a roll sometimes, too."

"I know. Your dad's funny. Okay, it's cute when it's your dad."

"Maybe your dad is, too?"

"Well, when he's not being frustrating. So what's up?

"Thought I'd call and thank you for dropping by and taking notes today."

"I was just curious about what you were doing with the computers. You really seem to like working with that kind of stuff."

"It's like a math puzzle. No, it is a math puzzle, a bunch of 'em."

"I felt a little like Alice, down that rabbit hole Dr. Brown mentioned."

I nodded to the wall. "Sometimes I feel that way, too."

She laughed.

"So you know Pat?" I asked.

"Yeah. And George and Mike, too. We sort of grew up together. Used to go to the same church."

"Used to?"

"Oh, Pat still comes sometimes, but lately she says she's leaning towards agnosticism." She paused. "Mike says he's an atheist." I heard a sigh. "And George is just too busy most Sundays. Busy watching basketball on the tube, is my guess."

"Small world on campus. But you're friends?"

"Not like when we were younger. But, yeah, we're," she paused again, "friends."

"I see. Small world on campus. It's cool that you're friends."

"Yeah." Her voice brightened a bit. "It is. Hey, are you going to church Sunday?" 

"Yeah, I usually go."

"Would you like to come to mine?"

"What time?"

"There's a sermon at ten, and after that we'll have Sunday School."

"In the morning, eh? That should work okay. Our ward meets in the afternoon this year, so I could fit it in, no problem."

"Ward?"

"Congregation. As in ward of a city or a hospital."

She chuckled. "Hospital for sinners?"

I chuckled too. "Right. Where and when should I meet you?"

"Can you meet me at my house about fifteen before? We can walk from here."

"Sounds good."

"So Is that computer of yours going to keep you busy all day tomorrow?"

"'Fraid so, pretty much. I'd invite you over to watch, but it's a pretty deep rabbit hole."

"Have you been making any progress?"

"A bit. I realized I need more tools that I don't have for the group coded recording circuits. Also found out for sure that Giselle's Color Computer does MFM data, so I'm switching to work on MFM."

She laughed. "As if I would know what that meant."

"It means it will be more compatible with Radio Shack's and IBM's formats."

"Well, compatibility with IBM's, uhm, stuff? is a good thing, isn't it?"

"Who knows? Well, maybe I'll have a better idea about that when I'm done with this."

"Uhm," she hesitated. "Can I come by in the evening?"

"If you don't mind watching me running up and down that rabbit hole, sure."

 She laughed. "Now I'm imagining you as the White Rabbit."

I opened my mouth, but only an "Ah!" came out.

"What?"

"Never mind. I don't want to give you a bad impression."

"What?"

"Your parents are listening?"

"Yeah, they are."

"I really wouldn't want to give them a bad impression."

She snickered at that. "Now you've got to tell me."

"Well, I guess the only way out of this hole I just dug myself is probably going further down. Are you familiar with Jefferson Airplane?"

"Jefferson Airplane?"

"The band."

"I don't guess so. But that name just got my parents' attention."

"There's a song they sang, called 'White Rabbit'."

"Mom just asked me, 'That White Rabbit?'." She covered the mouthpiece, and I heard a muffled, "What White Rabbit?"

"Do I dare sing a few lines? It's a drug culture song."

"Oh. Drugs. Yuck."

"Hold the phone away from your ear a minute. Okay?"

"Huh?"

"Ready?"

"Okay." Her voice sounded distant enough, so I held the mouthpiece away from my mouth and sang the first five lines, through asking Alice.

"Not a good lyric, huh?"

"Is that what that song says? I thought I liked it."

I heard a snort of laughter.

"My mom's laughing. Dad's trying to keep a straight face and look very strict."

Now I heard him laugh.

"Yep. That's what it says. They did sing some things slightly better. Only slightly." I sang a bit of the chorus of 'Somebody to love'."

"That's a song I like. Mom's says you have a good voice. Do you have the record?"

"Tell your mom thanks. I should probably plead the fifth."

She laughed.

"I bought it when I was fourteen and didn't really know any better. Like most of my record collection."

Her voice turned away from the phone. "He says he bought it when he didn't know any better." Now it returned. "You'll have to let me see your record collection."

"Got some Bach in there, too. 'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring'."

"Bach's 'Joy'? That's good music."

"Performed on a synthesizer."

"Oh." She sounded a bit disappointed. "Well, can I listen to it tomorrow? Maybe it won't be as bad as it sounds." Her voice turned distant again. "'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring' ... on synthesizer, Mom."

I heard another spurt of laughter.

"Sure. But I've got a good straight orchestral arrangement of it, too."

"And I can listen to that, too."

"Well, I don't want to take too much of your time --"

"I don't mind."

"-- and I'd kind of like to see if I can make some more progress on this MFM data separator tonight."

"Well, okay, you can go back to your computer. If it's okay if I come visit tomorrow evening."

I chuckled quietly. "Sure. I look forward to seeing what you think of my record collection."

"I'll bet it's interesting."

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

"Well, anyway, see you tomorrow."

"Yeah. Tomorrow. Have a good night."

After we hung up, I called Denny to report my progress. I asked if he knew whether Motorola had any more of the Micro Chroma 68 boards that they could sell to students, and he said he didn't know, but he'd check. I also reported on my progress with the disk drives, and mentioned the scheduled meeting with Ms. Bight. He wished me luck getting the internship.

*****

Julia had been sitting patiently for about a half an hour while I worked on a program in BASIC to generate test data and write it to a floppy on Giselle's computer with her floppy drive, then write copies of it with my drives and compare the results. I had a Tabernacle Choir album playing in my room that included Bach's 'Joy'.

Giselle was waiting for me to give her her computer back, and they had been chatting while they waited.

I started yet another test run. It would take several minutes to complete, so I sat back and listened to the disk drives whirr and click.

"So you dance."

I looked at Giselle, questioning with my eyes why she had brought it up. She ignored me.

"You and Giselle were talking about dance? Yes, I dance."

"Is it fun?"

"Yeah. Great exercise, too."

"Giselle says she dances to strengthen her back."

"Modern dance," Giselle clarified.

"I've heard about it in my childhood education classes, but I'm not really sure what it is."

I stood and did some warm-up exercises -- plié and relevé, with port de bras. Giselle stood and mirrored the knee bends, the rising onto toes and returning, and the arm movement.

"Ballet?"

I went down to grand plié and shifted left, lifting my right leg high, like a sumo wrestler beginning shiko, and left it lifted for a few seconds before lowering it gently instead of stomping. Giselle copied me with laugh.

Julia drew back in surprise and amusement. "Expressive dance."

"-- is a part of modern. Modern's similar to ballet, sometimes," I explained. "But it's less formal and borrows from everything. It's more of a deliberate study in how the body moves, or, as somebody famous once said, a study in different ways 'to get from here to there'."

She looked at me doubtfully. "So you do it for exercise?"

"Training, coordination, self expression, not having to compete with anyone else, getting rid of stress, lots of reasons."

"Does everyone in your family dance?"

"Yeah, we all do, at least a little. Louise majored in dance education, didn't she, 'Zelle?"

"Yes, she did." Giselle nodded emphatically.

"Many Baptists think dancing leads to sin, but my preacher said expressive dance for childhood education, if it doesn't include too much hip movement, should be okay."

"Good for him. What do your parents think?"

"I've never seen them dance, but they sometimes watch ballet on TV. I guess your dad dances, too?"

"He does. Mom waltzes with Dad sometimes, but she isn't really a fan of dance."

"Professor Reeves dances!" She seemed to think this was a revelation.

"Yep," Giselle was quick to affirm. "He does foxtrot and swing and two-step and lots of older style dance steps."

"And he shadow-boxes to music, too," I added.

"Does he dance with other women besides your mom?"

"Sure. We have dances in the church's gym, and a lot of the men don't dance much, so Dad and some of the others who dance will dance with as many of the women as want to dance."

"Your mom doesn't mind?"

Giselle was glad to explain. "Mom says she's happy to just listen to the music and watch other people have fun."

Julia closed her eyes and breathed deeply, sighing, blinking several times.

The disk drive noises quieted.

I checked the screen. "Tests look good so far. I should let Giselle have her computer back. Could I put that Switched-on Bach on for you?"

"Sure."

I opened my drive and took the floppy out and put it in a sleeve, and we went to my room.

Julia stopped in the doorway of my room and shook her head. "Those aren't bunk beds. What do you call them?"

"Loft beds. They were Denny's idea, but it leaves lots of room for da--" I realized too late what I was revealing.

"Dancing." She had picked it up.

"Yeah. Dancing. And listening to music."

"Do you have girls in here to dance?" She sat down on an old bench seat Denny had saved when we had to junk the Fairlane van, and patted the space beside her.

I sat down too. "No. Well, I don't usually have girls in here at all. But I dance by myself a lot, especially when I'm feeling frustrated -- Wild dancing. Jumping and twirling."

"Do I want to see that?"

"Probably not. Not tonight, anyway. No real gymnastics, so it's not really all that interesting anyway."

She leaned forward to get a better view inside the tea box. "That's a lot of records."

"Not quite a hundred. I guess I spent way too much money on them, even though I got most of them at less than half-price through a record club." I leaned forward too, and scanned the spines of the albums, found the Switched-on Bach album, pulled it out, replaced the Tabernacle Choir disc on the turntable with it, and settled the needle on the disc.

Julia listened in silence for a bit. "It's different, but not ... bad." She stopped.

I followed her gaze to the photocube on the shelf between the desk and the bottom of the loft bed.

"Satomi."

"She's cute. Is she your girlfriend?"

"Brother Masafuku would have issues with that. She and Teruo will be marrying sometime this year."

"Who is ... are they?"

"Missionaries I worked with in Japan."

"Do you have a picture of Terr ... Teru ..."

"Teruo." I had to think. "I don't think so. Satomi is one very special person. Genki. Uh, vivacious. Heh. Ancient English? That photo doesn't do her justice. Lots of positive energy. I think all the elders, uhm, male missionaries, had crushes on her."

"Special ..." I heard the disappointment in her voice.

"Crushes are not love, although I guess I do want her to be happy."

"Crushes." Her voice was tiny. "Love." She remained looking at the cube, or maybe past it, through the window to the darkness outside.

"My sister Louise explained the basics to me when I was, how old? Fourteen? Twelve? When you like the way someone looks, and even when being near someone makes you feel good, that's a crush. I have a crush on you, by the way."

"Really?" She turned at me with amusement mixed with doubt.

"Huge crush. Since the day we met."

"Oh." She smiled.

"Anyway, crushes are separate from love, and people can have lots of them."

"Hmm."

"Love is when you want someone to be happy, and you can love lots of people, too."

"Well, if that's how you define it ..."

"When you want to be the one who makes someone happy, that can be love, too, but it can also become lust, as well. Louise didn't tell me that, it's something I've figured out for myself."

"Too much philosophy."

"I like figuring things like this out. It makes life easier when everyone around tries to be, what is that? Dogmatic."

She laughed. "So do you think you love me?"

"I want you to be happy. I'm not sure yet whether I want to dare to want to be the one to make you happy the rest of your life, but it's kind of early to be trying to figure that out."

She smiled. "Words." She laughed quietly. "Well, I guess I have a crush on your dad. Is that okay?"

"Sure. I have a crush on him, too. He's pretty cool."

"Really?" She looked at me in surprise and more than a little apprehension.

"Before I was a missionary, he embarrassed me. While I was out, I began to understand him. We teach English in Japan, you know? As a service activity."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I found myself using some of the techniques he uses in his Spanish classes, and wishing I'd taken the time to learn more from him. I figured out he's pretty cool."

"Oh!" The apprehension disappeared, replaced by relief and, well, happiness.

She become pensive. "I've thought I had a crush on you several times, but you keep turning out to be different from what I expect. You know, you're a little scary sometimes."

I laughed. "I've been told that."

"I'm not sure I can keep up."

"No problem. I won't ask anything of you that you're not ready for."

She thought for a moment. "That sounds like a promise easily made, and sometimes hard to keep."

"Well, I'll try not to, anyway."

"You're already not keeping it, but if you're trying, maybe that's good enough."

We both paused, maybe for breath, maybe to digest what had just happened.

"So, we're busy showing you what I do for fun. What about you? What do you do for fun?"

"Scripture games, crossword puzzles, ..."

"No card games, I guess?"

"Uno is okay."

"Pit?"

"Pit's fun."

"Good. Board games?"

"Depends. Some board games are too much like gambling."

"Is it pretty much a personal choice?"

"To some degree, although you can get in trouble with some of the stricter members if you aren't careful."

"Chess? Checkers?"

"I play both. Are you good at chess?"

"No, no patience for it, really. Hmm. I have both chess and checkers programs for the Micro Chroma 68. Interested?"

"Sure."

I loaded the chess program, and let her play against the computer. She beat it quickly and I laughed. Then we played two player and she gave me some pointers.

"So, can you use the disk drives on this yet?"

"No, I still have to write a bunch of code and wire up more circuitry. Putting data on the disk is only half the problem. You have to be able to find it again once it's there."

"Hmm. I wonder if I really want to know what that means."

We dragged Giselle and my parents into a couple of rounds of Pit before Julia said goodnight and went home about ten so I wouldn't be too sleepy getting up at five to run my newspapers in the morning.

[JMR202004022021 -- major edits.]

Chapter 11.1: Headwinds -- 68701

Chapter 11.2: Headwinds -- Differences

"Cisneros residence, what can we do you for?"

"Uh, hello, Mr. Cisneros. This is Joe Reeves. I'd like to speak with Julia, if I could."

"Julia, somebody who says he is Joe Reeves wants to know if he can talk with you."

I could her Julia's voice in the background, but I couldn't tell what she was saying.

"Yes." Her father's voice was turned away from the phone.

More of her voice in the background.

"No."

Still more of her voice, mixed with her mother's voice.

"Don't ask me." He paused again before his voice turned back towards the phone. "Okay, you're in luck today. She says she'll talk to you."

"Dad, give me that phone!" This time her voice was distinct, though distant.

"Thank you."

I heard sounds of the phone changing hands, with Julia's father's chuckle in the background.

"Hi Joe."

I was still chuckling, myself.

"Don't laugh. You'll just encourage him."

"My dad gets on a roll sometimes, too."

"I know. Okay, it's cute when it's not frustrating. Well, what's up?

"Thought I'd call and thank you for dropping by and taking notes today."

"I was just curious. You really seem to like working with that stuff."

"It's like a math puzzle."

"I felt a little like Alice down that rabbit hole Dr. Brown mentioned."

"Sometimes I feel that way, too."

She laughed.

"So you know Pat?" I asked.

"And George and Mike. We sort of grew up together. We used to go to the same church."

"Used to?"

"Pat still comes sometimes, but lately she says she's leaning towards agnosticism. Mike says he's an atheist now. And George is just too busy most Sundays. Probably busy watching basketball on the tube."

"But you're friends?"

"Not like when we were younger."

"Oh. I see. But it's cool that you're friends."

"Yeah. Are you going to church Sunday?" 

"I usually go."

"Would you like to come to mine?"

"What time?"

"There's a general sermon at ten, and a communion meeting at ten thirty, and scripture study and witnessing after communion."

"In the morning, eh? That should work okay. Our ward meets in the afternoon this year, so I could fit it in, no problem."

"Ward?"

"Congregation. As in ward of a city or a hospital."

She chuckled. "Hospital for sinners?"

I chuckled too. "Right. Where and when should I meet you?"

"Meet me at my house about fifteen before? We can walk."

"Sounds fine."

"Is that computer going to keep you busy all day tomorrow?"

"'Fraid so, pretty much. I'd invite you over to watch, but it's a pretty deep rabbit hole."

"Been making any progress tonight?"

"Realized I need more tools that I don't have for the group coded recording circuits. Also found out for sure that Giselle's Color Computer does MFM data, so I'm switching to work on MFM."

"As if I would know what that meant."

"It means it will be more compatible with Radio Shack's and IBM's formats."

"Compatibility with IBM's is a good thing, isn't it?"

"Who knows? Well, maybe I'll have a better idea about that when I'm done with this."

"Uhm, can I come by in the evening?"

"If you don't mind watching me running up and down that rabbit hole, sure."

 She laughed. "I'm just imagining you as the White Rabbit."

I opened my mouth, but only an "Ah!" came out.

"What?"

"Never mind. I don't want to give you a bad impression."

"What?"

"Your parents are listening."

"Yes, they are."

"I really wouldn't want to give them a bad impression."

"Now you've got to tell me."

"Well, I guess the only way out of this hole I just dug myself is probably going further down. Are you familiar with Jefferson Airplane?"

"Jefferson Airplane?"

"The band."

"I don't guess so. But that name got my parents' attention."

"There's a song they sang, 'White Rabbit'."

"Mom just asked me, 'That White Rabbit?'." She covered the mouth piece, and I heard a muffled, "What White Rabbit?"

"Do I dare sing a few lines? It's a drug culture song."

"Oh. Drugs. Yuck."

"Hold the phone away from your ear a minute. Okay?"

"Huh?"

"Ready?"

"Okay." Her voice sounded distant enough, so I held the mouthpiece away from my mouth and sang the first five lines, through asking Alice.

"Not a good lyric, huh?"

"Is that what that song says? I thought I liked it."

I heard a spurt of laughter.

"My mom's laughing. Dad is trying to look very strict."

Now I heard him laugh.

"Yep. That's what it says. They did sing some things slightly better. Only slightly." I sang a bit of the chorus of 'Somebody to love'."

"Okay, that song is one I like. My Mom says you have a good voice. Do you have the record?"

"I should probably plead the fifth."

She laughed.

"I bought it when I was fourteen and didn't really know any better. Like most of my record collection."

Her voice turned away from the phone again. "He says he bought it when he didn't know any better." Her voice returned to direct again. "You'll have to let me see your record collection."

"Got some Bach in there, too. 'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring'."

"Bach? 'Jesu'? That is good music."

"Performed on a synthesizer."

"Oh." She sounded a bit disappointed. "Well, can I listen to it tomorrow? Maybe it won't be as bad as it sounds." Her voice suddenly turned distant. "'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring' ... on synthesizer, Mom."

I heard another spurt of laughter.

"Sure. I've got a good straight orchestral arrangement of it, too."

"I look forward to that."

"Well, I don't want to take too much of your time --"

"I don't mind."

"-- and I'd kind of like to see if I can make some more progress on this MFM data separator tonight."

"Oh, well, by all means. It's okay if I come visit tomorrow evening?"

"Sure. I look forward to seeing your reaction to my record collection."

"Sounds interesting. Okay. See you tomorrow."

"Have a good night."

 [JMR202003200921 -- moved to here, with edits:]

After we hung up, I called Denny to report my progress. I asked if he knew whether Motorola had any more of the Micro Chroma 68 boards that they could sell to students, and he said he'd check.

 [JMR202003200921 -- moved to here, with edits.]

*****

Julia had been sitting patiently for about a half an hour while I worked on a program in BASIC to write test data to a floppy on Giselle's computer with her floppy drive, then write a copy of it with my drives and compare the results. In the background, filtering in from my room, I had a Tabernacle Choir album that included Jesu playing.

Giselle was waiting for me to give her her computer back, and they had been chatting while they waited.

I started yet another test run. It would take several minutes to run, so I sat back and listened to the disk drives whirr and click.

"So you dance."

I looked at Giselle, questioning with my eyes why she had brought it up. She ignored me.

"So you and Giselle were talking about dance. Yes, I dance."

"Is it fun?"

"Yeah. Great exercise, too."

"Giselle says she dances to strengthen her back."

"Modern dance," Giselle clarified.

"I've heard about it in my childhood education classes, but I'm not really sure what it is."

I stood and did some warm-up exercises -- plié and relevé, with port de bras. Giselle stood and mirrored the knee bends, the rising onto toes and returning, and the arm movement.

"Ballet?"

I went down to grand plié and shifted left, lifting my right leg high, like a sumo wrestler beginning shiko, and left it lifted for a few seconds before lowering it gently instead of stomping. Giselle copied me with laugh.

Julia drew back in surprise and amusement. "Expressive dance."

"-- is a part of modern. It's similar to ballet, sometimes," I explained. "But it's less formal and borrows from everything. It's more of a deliberate study in how the body moves, or, as somebody famous once said, a study in different ways 'to get from here to there'."

She looked at me doubtfully. "So you do it for exercise?"

"Training, coordination, self expression, not having to compete with anyone else, getting rid of stress, lots of reasons."

"Does everyone in your family dance?"

"Yeah, we all do, at least a little. Louise majored in dance education, didn't she, 'Zelle?"

"Yes, she did." Giselle nodded emphatically.

"Many Baptists think dancing is a sin, but my preacher said expressive dance for childhood education, if it doesn't include burlesque, should be okay."

"Good for him. What do your parents think?"

"I've never seen them dance, but they sometimes watch ballet on TV. I guess your dad dances, too?"

"He does. Mom waltzes with Dad sometimes, but she isn't really a fan of dance."

"Professor Reeves dances!" She seemed to think this was a revelation.

"Yep," Giselle was quick to affirm. "He does foxtrot and swing and two-step and lots of older style dance steps."

"And he shadow-boxes to music, too," I added.

"Does he dance with other women besides your mom?"

"Sure. We have dances in the church's gym, and a lot of the men don't dance much, so Dad and some of the others who do dance will dance with as many of the women as want to."

"Your mom doesn't mind?"

Giselle was glad to explain. "Mom says she's happy to just listen to the music and watch other people have fun."

Julia closed her eyes and sighed, then blinked several times.

The disk drive noises quieted.

I checked the screen. "Tests look good so far. I should let Giselle have her computer back. Should I put that Switched-on Bach on for you?"

"Sure."

 I opened my drive and took the floppy out and put it in a sleeve, and we went to my room.

Julia stopped in the doorway and shook her head. "Those aren't bunk beds. What do you call them."

"Loft beds. They were Denny's idea, but it leaves lots of room for da--" I realized too late what I was revealing.

"Dancing."

"Yeah. Dancing. And listening to music."

"Do you have girls in here to dance?" She sat down on old bench seat Denny had saved when we had to junk the Fairlane van and patted the space beside her.

I sat down with her. "No. But I dance by myself a lot, especially when I'm feeling frustrated. Wild dancing. Jumping and twirling."

"Do I want to see that?"

"Probably not tonight, anyway. No real gymnastics, so it's not really all that interesting anyway."

She leaned forward and looked at the tea box full of records. "That's a lot of records."

"Not quite a hundred. I probably spent too much money on them, even though I got most of them at less than half-price through a record club." I leaned forward and scanned the backs of the albums, found the Switched-on Bach album, pulled it out, traded it for the Tabernacle Choir disc on the turntable, and set the needle on the disk.

Julia listened in silence for a bit. "It's different, but not bad."

"So, we're busy showing you what I do for fun. What about you? What do you do for fun?"

"Scripture games, crossword puzzles, ..."

"No card games, I guess."

"Uno is okay."

"Pit?"

"Pit's fun."

"Good. Board games?"

"Depends. Some board games are too much like gambling."

"Is it pretty much a personal choice?"

"To some degree, although you can get in trouble with some of the stricter members if you aren't careful."

"Chess? Checkers?"

"I play both. Are you good at Chess?"

"No, no patience for it, I guess. Hmm. I have both chess and checkers programs for the Micro Chroma 68. Interested?"

"Sure."

I loaded the Chess program, and let her play against the computer. She beat it quickly and I laughed. Then we played two player and she gave me some pointers.

"So, can you use the disk drives on this yet?"

"No, I either have to write a bunch of code or wire up one more circuit board. Putting data on the disk is only half the problem. You have to be able to find it again once it's there."

"Hmm."

We dragged Giselle and my parents into a couple of rounds of Pit before Julia said goodnight and went home about ten so I wouldn't be too sleepy getting up at five to run my newspapers in the morning.

[JMR202003200921 -- moved from here:] [JMR202003200557 -- added: ]

After Julia left, I called Denny. He said he'd ask around about whether Motorola had any more of the Micro Chroma 68 boards that they could sell to students.

[JMR202003200557 -- added.][JMR202003200921 -- moved from here.]

Chapter 11.3: Headwinds --

TOC

---

[Backed up at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/03/bk-33209-headwinds-differences.html.]

Backup: 33209: Headwinds -- 68701

Backup of https://joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/2020/03/33209-headwinds-68701.html.

---

Chapter 11.0: Headwinds -- IBM

Chapter 11.1: Headwinds -- 68701

I looked up at the tap at the open door.

"Pat. Hi. What brings you to the Electrical and Electronics Building? Slumming?"

"The profs were talking about your success yesterday with raw I/O. We wanted to see for ourselves."

"We? Ah, Mike. George. Hi guys."

"Yo."

"Hey."

"Well, come in and join the crowd."

They came into the electronics lab and joined the group of students gathered around the lab table where my lab partners, Jeff and Mark, were sitting in front of the Micro Chroma 68.

Dr. Brown hadn't wanted to take more class time, so he had suggested that I take time after class to let interested students watch me reproduce my results from the day before. I could chase them off after, if they distracted my progress too much.

Jeff and Mark were by this time familiar with the Micro Chroma 68, and had volunteered to help as soon as they saw me coming in with the computer again.

We had the video output connected through a splitter to both my TV and the lab's large-screen TV so the other students could see what was showing on my TV screen.

I walked Jeff and Mark through my work of the day before, letting them operate the computer and set up the circuits from my notes while I drew diagrams on the chalkboard and explained and answered questions about the circuits and the timing issues as I understood them, starting with bit-banging and working up to the FM encoding. Dr. Brown added comments when he thought they were necessary.

Part way through the demonstration, I noticed Julia watching from the doorway. When I raised my hand in a wave to her, Pat turned and looked, and something passed between them that I didn't follow. Julia entered the room and sat in my seat at the lab table.

When we'd finished demonstrating recording and playing back test data in FM, Jeff looked up from the screen. "Is there some way we can look at a track before it gets written?"

I looked at Dr. Brown and he just grinned back at me. So I thought for a moment. I reached over to the breadboard and removed the FM decode circuit.

"We haven't written anything to track 30, yet, Jeff. Bump the heads up to track thirty."

He typed in the commands that moved the head.

"Run the read routine and let's look at the read buffer."

He did so, and we watched him list patches of mostly zeroes, of short repeating sequences, and of random numbers.

"Does it look pretty random?"

Everyone thought it did.

"I think if we looked hard enough, we should find twelve cycles of line noise in there. Should we take the time?"

Julia frowned. "I hate to ask a stupid question, but what's line noise?"

Mike said, "Thank you for asking."

I gave her a nod I hoped was reassuring. "There are no stupid questions, right, Dr. Brown?"

"Except the ones you don't ask." He nodded sagely.

Dr. Brown's students all nodded, too. They'd heard it before.

"The sixty Hertz hum in the power line," Mark answered for me.

"Sorry?"

Jerry held up a power plug. "Wall power. If I'm following this right, 300 revolutions per minute means that a track takes a fifth of a second to read." He looked at me for confirmation.

"Right."

"And a fifth of a second," he continued, "is time for twelve alternating current cycles, from plus 120 volts RMS to minus 120 volts RMS and back again."

Julia tilted her head. "Is that the hum my stereo makes when I turn the volume way up and nothing is playing?"

"Yep."

"Oh, I get it!" Greg laughed. "Thank you for asking that question."

Several other students murmured agreement.

Winston shook his head. "It sounds to me like an exercise in advanced statistics."

Nobody seemed anxious to spend time on the analysis.

"Oh, well," I said, "I'll just have to try this in the statistics class, I guess."

"So what about yesterday's data?" Mark asked. "Is it still there?"

"It should be. Jeff, can you bump the heads back down to track 5 and run the read routine?"

He did so, and listed the buffer again.

"Mathematical sequences," Julia commented in a low voice. Then Giselle's and Julia's names showed up.

"Hey, hey, hey, who are Giselle and Julia?" Mike wisecracked.

"Giselle is Joe's sister," Julia said with barbs in her voice.

"Yep." My eyes met Julia's.

She shook her head, barely perceptibly.

"My sister. Shall we type in everyone's names, and write them to track 30?"

There was some laughter, but Jeff started editing the buffer contents, grinning as he worked. He added Julia's and Giselle's names without prompting, and asked for Pat, Mike, and George's names, to add, too. He ran the write routine, cleared the buffer, and then ran the read routine, and it read back perfectly.

Julia clapped a slow clap, and others joined in, with some cheering and laughter.

"I stlll don't really follow what you're doing," she said when the noise quieted down, "and your presentation could use some work, but now I believe you when you say it puts stuff on the disk."

"That wasn't the presentation for the board of directors, thank you." I chuckled, and Julia laughed. Some of the other students laughed nervously, and Dr. Brown chuckled.

"Okay, everybody. I now need to dive deep into some arcane math, so I can use these drives to share data with other computers. The fun stuff is over for the day, unless you're into really arcane math."

Mark and Jeff exchanged glances.

"So have you figured out yet how we can get computers like these?" Mark asked.

"There is Radio Shack's Color Computer, as I've mentioned before."

Jeff shook his head. "We want to build our own."

"I can ask Denny if Motorola has any more of the Micro Chroma 68 PC boards that they would be willing to sell to students, but wouldn't you rather build something with a more modern processor?"

"Waiting for you to build something better has its own costs," Jeff groused. "This obviously works now."

There were murmurs of agreement.

"I'll ask. But I really think we could design something cool if we worked together."

There were murmurs of approval.

Jeff was not to be satisfied. "But when?"

"What do you think, Dr. Brown?"

Dr. Brown grinned. "I'm not going to tell anyone what they can't do with their own time."

"Okay." I rubbed my forehead and checked my watch. "But I want everyone to understand a few things. The reason I am using Motorola parts is that my brother Denny can get me lots of those. He can't do that for non-family, so if you decide to build these with me, you'll be buying the parts yourselves."

Jerry gave two thumbs up. "No problems here."

Winston added, "All the more reason to get parts ordered now."

"And I'm not promising anything, especially if we start now. Don't blame me if you decide you wanted a 6502 or Z-80 or 1802."

"No problem."

"We've got this."

"What's a Z-80 got to do with it?"

"In fact," I added, "no guarantees of anything. Strictly participate at your own risk."

"If you're saying we're going to see something today, I'm definitely in," Mark said, to general nods and murmurs of agreement.

"See something?"

"A parts list would be good."

"Okay, what I have in mind for myself is replicating this box using the 6801, then the 6809, and then the 68000. But I'm sure most of you don't want to end up with three or four computers."

Jennifer shook her head. "Let us decide when to get off the train?"

I thought for a full minute before proceeding with a sigh. "How many of you want trainers like the 8080 trainers that the lab has?"

All the electronics students raised their hands.

I looked at Dr. Brown.

He grinned back. "What do you suggest?"

I tilted my head left and right, stretching the muscles in my neck.

"I think I want to start with an EPROM 6805, just enough to decode a keypad and a keyboard and send address and data to seven segment displays. A 6805 is powerful enough to build a calculator with, but it will quickly become uninteresting if you want to hang a display on it, and run a full OS and programming languages."

I went to the chalkboard and erased a panel while I thought.

"Starting with a 6801 will be one step quicker, but it will cost more money."

Winston spoke up. "Time is money for me."

"Okay." I drew a square for the CPU. "68701 here." I wrote the number in.

"Should I take notes?" Julia offered, to my surprise.

"If you would, sure. Thanks."

She got a pen and a pad of paper out of her purse. "68 .. 68701, right?" She copied what I was drawing.

"Right. 68701. I'll probably have to find a source for that. The keyboard and keypad don't need exact timing so we can use an RC circuit for the clock, and the resistors and capacitors are probably in our kits, or can be got at Radio Shack." I sketched those in. "Latches for de-multiplexing address and data can found at Radio Shack, too. Don't need full 6821s for the ports, so we can use latches for those, too. We can get those are Radio Shack, so we can talk about specifics next week." I drew them in.

"Hexadecimal keypad and six, no, seven seven-segment LED displays." And I drew those in. "We'll have to find part numbers for displays that can be persuaded to show hexadecimal codes. We may be able to find those at Radio Shack, or maybe not. The 7400 series logic to glue it all together can definitely be found there."

I continued filling in blanks, and most of the students had paper out and were copying the diagrams. Julia was checking the notes she was taking for me with Mark.

"Boy, I wish you guys had this much motivation in my classes." Dr. Brown deadpanned.

Laughter erupted. I waited until it subsided a bit.

"It's because of your classes that we can follow what this genius is doing."

"Winston, we are all geniuses."

"Whatever."

More laughter.

"Yeah. Okay, this should be enough for a trainer that can be attached to a breadboard, like the 8080 trainers, and I'll find a source for the monitor program. And then we can turn it into a keyboard controller. Let's get together after class next week to make real schematics. Anyway, what you should be doing over the weekend is making your own version of the diagrams, and looking around in stores, in magazines, and in the library or whatever, information and for sources for buying the parts. And we can share what we find next week. Probably want to hold off actually ordering anything until we've had some more time to plan things out."

George looked at Mike and Pat. "I think I'm in on this."

Mike responded with, "Me, too. Pat?"

Pat tilted her head. "I'm thinking about it. Julia, what do you think?"

"I'm here for my own reasons."

There were scattered chuckles.

Julia's and my eyes met, and she didn't add anything.

Dr. Brown cleared his throat. "Was anyone hoping to build something with the 68000?"

Several hands came up.

"For what it's worth, starting small is the best way. I do not plan on approving the 68000 for the microprocessors class. Not this time around. It's a bit too powerful and too expensive, and looks like a nice big rabbit hole to dive into. When the cost comes down, I'll rethink that, but for now, I very much approve of the decision to start with the 6801."

He paused for thought. "Look ahead, be sure you do your own work, take notes, make diagrams. Leave something you can show me, and we can definitely use this in the Microprocessors class."

More murmurs of enthusiasm.

I sighed. "Okay, I've got to get these disks running. Thanks for coming to encourage me, and let's get together again next week."

Most of the students stopped on their way out to say thanks. Pat, Julia, Mike, and George left together.

Dr. Brown hummed some country and western tune. "I've been talking with the school board."

I gave him a sharp look.

"You bet I have. I have permission, if there's interest, to turn this project of yours into a multi-semester project class, if things go well."

"Now I really feel pressure." I chuckled wryly.

He just grinned.

I still had time, before I had to go home to deliver newspapers, to put an hour into working out math, turning the math into circuitry, and testing my results with the oscilloscope.

Chapter 11.2: Headwinds -- Religion

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[Backed up at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/03/bk-33209-headwinds-68701.html.]

Backup: 33209: Headwinds -- IBM

Backup of https://joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/2020/03/33209-headwinds-ibm.html.

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Chapter 10: Parameters

Chapter 11.1: Headwinds -- IBM

(You might think that from this point on, it would be smooth sailing. But that would not make an interesting story. Moreover, designing interface circuits for floppy drives is hard, even when you start with drives that contain their basic electronics. And, of course, technical problems are not the only problems.)

That Thursday afternoon, while I was folding newspapers, Ms. Bight called.

"How's it going?"

"Not bad." 

"Making progress on your computer?"

"Yeah. I discovered that what I thought was MFM when we talked last is not exactly what IBM calls MFM."

"Ah. Good for you. How did that happen?"

"I bought a couple of raw drives, and I'm doing research on how to build the interface electronics and driver software."

"Raw? How raw?"

"No data separator, no electronics. Just the chassis, heads, motors, worm gear, solenoids."

She laughed. "Are you regretting that yet?"

"No way! I'm learning a lot. I just got some raw track writing and reading, with lots of errors, this afternoon. Then I got some FM tracks written and verified, so I'm pretty sure the heads are working . Should be able to work up a state machine for the data separator and modulator state machines for group code recording within a week or so."

"GCR? Not MFM?"

"Well, I'm working on compatibility with a variety of machines, so I'm planning to add the circuitry to do both."

"That's definitely ambitious. Raw tracks. Dang." She was quiet for a moment. I have some bad news, but I don't want you to think it's a permanent decision."

"Oh. Okay." Disappointment drained the adrenaline of the afternoon's success.

"My boss questioned me closely about your interest in Motorola."

"Oh?" The adrenaline drain slowed.

"He didn't specifically say that was the reason, but said he would not approve the internship."

"Oh. Well, ...." With the bad news real, my heart settled a bit.

"I was already intending to go over his head anyway, but, if what you're telling me about being able to read and write data is real, I think I have a strong chance of getting him to change his mind."

"Without FM, the raw read tends to lose sync and drop lots of bits over a track's length, of course."

"Of course. It's to be expected."

"FM encoding was pretty solid."

"Interesting. Sector size?"

"Whole track, not doing sectors yet."

"That's impressive. Can I come take a look at your experimental rig?"

"I think so, I'll check with Dr. Brown."

*****

While I was out delivering the newspapers, I thought about air.

I was walking the route instead of riding my bike. Walking was good exercise, and it allowed me to drop the newspaper directly on most of the customers' porches.

When I was twelve, I would ride my bike and throw the the newspapers onto the customers' lawns, porches, sidewalks, and driveways as I road past. I learned how to bank the papers off the wind as if the newspapers were Frisbees, using the air to help me land the papers (usually) in safe, soft, dry spots.

Before I got on with TI, I worked for a month for a local small business machines company. They sold and serviced copiers, faxes, and similar machines as an independent dealer. The boss had hoped I would be able to help them get into the nascent small office computer market, but I had trouble getting into their workflow.

The company was close enough to home that I could ride my bike, so I did. Part of the road to work was uphill, and the west Texas wind was often in my face as I took that hill. I'd run out of energy at the top, and have to slack back on the pedals for a minute or two while I caught my breath. And it didn't help that I was often running too close to the wire, needing the minutes lost to the wind.

Ideas from novels I had read would return to me as I pumped, and I'd imagine things like gravity-normal propulsion for my bike, and friction-negating stasis fields to get rid of the push-back from the headwinds.

And one day I had this conversation with God:

No friction? Been reading too much Sci-Fi?

This wind bites. A friction negation field would let me slice through it like a knife through margarine that's been sitting out of the fridge all day in summer.

Friction, huh? All friction?

Well, it's easier to imagine a non-selective field.

My mind's eye was directed to my feet on the pedals.

Hmm. Okay, lack of friction could make it hard to keep my feet on the pedals.

True.

Then my focus was directed to my brakes,

Okay, it would be hard to stop, too, ...

... and to my tires.

... if I could even get started, or keep the bike in an upright position.

Now my focus was directed to the various threaded parts -- axles, cranks, brake levers, and so on.

Okay, okay, lack of friction could make it hard to keep the bike itself from falling apart.

Then I saw the bike frame at the molecular level, and the inter-molecular ionic forces which cause friction.

Where does friction come from?

Arrgghh. Interstitial ionic forces. Lack of those forces would lead to universal sublimation. The parts themselves would disappear in various vapors. I get it now. Friction is my friend. I'll quit complaining.

Heh. Just trying to help you get to work on time and in a better mood. Shall we talk about gravity again?

Heh. No thanks. I'll focus on pumping. I do remember that gravity is helpful, too.

On that job, I took the blame on myself for the times when I would get out to deliver supplies or do some simple maintenance, and the customer had problems that I did now know how to handle. After a month, I had no more room for self-blame. I took a day off, interviewed at TI, got an offer, and gave the business machines company notice.

So, you ask me why God didn't explain to me that the boss was making a mistake trusting the office manager to see to my training? Why God wouldn't encourage me to ask the boss for some different way to train?

I'm not sure He didn't try. Even now, I have a bit of pride that keeps me from hearing a lot of things He tries to tell me.

But maybe God wanted me to go to TI instead.

That office manager at the small business machines company tended to waste a lot of my training time talking about getting his metaphorical tubes cleaned, and other things a young single Christian shouldn't be thinking about.

Not that the exposure to his ideas was going to somehow put a curse on me. It might have caused me problems, or I might have found valid ways to deal with other people having problems they needed to talk about. Or both.

But it was not good technical training, and the boss really didn't have anyone else who could train me. The other technician who could have trained me had a bad habit of going on benders and disappearing for a week or a month, and he went on one about a week after I started.

They did end up getting into the small office computer market, and last time I checked they were still in business.

So, how about the wind on your way home today?

It would be nice if it were a tailwind for a change. Sometimes I think you mean it personal when the wind reverses directions before I head home.

I don't really remember if I had a tailwind that specific day. I do recall that, by the time I quit, I had gotten somewhat used to the winds, and to getting out of the house earlier in the mornings.

And, no, I did not try to ride my bike to the TI plant near the Midland Airfield. Not more than once, anyway. Mom and Dad arranged for me to be able to drive the Colt.

Chapter 11.2 Headwinds -- 68701:

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[Backed up at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/03/bk-33209-headwinds-ibm.html.]

Backup01: 33209: Parameters

JMR202005191832: Later backup of https://joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/2020/03/33209-parameters.html.
Earlier backup at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/03/bk-33209-parameters.html.

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Chapter 9: Interviewing IBM

Chapter 10: Parameters

(As I mentioned already, the real me was not brave enough or something, and never got disk drives for the Micro Chroma 68. Maybe he was a bit lazy in his thinking. But he thought saving up for tuition at a university where he could get a full bachelor's degree was more important than getting and developing his tools. And he had some other faults in his thought processes, but it is not my purpose to make this a confessional. Everybody makes mistakes.)

Friday after classes and newspapers, I loaded my stuff in the Colt again and headed to Austin. Got there late but got a look at Denny's computer. He was just finishing the box when I arrived.

He had used my coming as an excuse, and got the computer put together as far as mine, but his box was much nicer. He had a router, and other woodworking tools which I did not, and he had more experience working with wood than I did.

"By the way, TSC tells me that we should be able to run Mini-Flex with the dynamic RAM as I did it, but we need 48K to run the full Flex 2."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Flex 2 kernel loads and runs from $A000 to $BFFF."

"Hmm. Now that you mention it, Brad mentioned that when he saw your circuit."

"Trying to work out a good but cheap way to use all the memory it has."

"Maybe that gating the deselection lines with xor gates, like you were considering before?"

"That ought to work, and it might be the cleanest approach."

While we worked on the computers and discussed plans for Saturday, Denise listened, not saying much. When we talked about ways to tune the cassette interfaces without an oscilloscope, I saw her grimace.

*****

In the morning, Denise went with us to the surplus store.

"Got to make sure my husband doesn't spend too much money," she commented with a wry, knowing smile as we left the house.

The two of them exchanged glances, and Denise wrinkled her nose at Denny.

He chuckled resignedly. "I know what our budget is, honey. I can keep things within limits."

I kept out of it.

At the surplus store, the first thing we picked out was EPROM erasers. Then we checked our budgets and looked at floppy disk drives.

"Those eight inchers are a real steal," John said as we passed them by. Denny and I exchanged glances.

I shook my head. "Well, if I wanted compatibility with the school's 8080 trainer system floppies, I guess they would be. Or if I wanted compatibility with IBM's old minicomputers and mainframes. At least, I guess they aren't IBM's recent high density format."

"No, only capable of a quarter of a megabyte. But I'll give you two for the price of one."

That was tempting.

(These days, such drives go at really good prices among the retro community. Of course, inflation means that that it would not have been a good financial investment, even of the small sort. If you worry about the monetary value of such things.)

Denny shook his head. "Maybe later, but I don't think I have space for two drives that big."

"Ah, well," John grinned. "I guess I'll just have to show you the five and a quarter inchers I got in last week. A little more expensive, but they have opposing heads for double-sided disks, and the heads are double-density capable. If you don't want those, I have single-sided, double-density five and a quarter inchers for cheap, too."

"None of these have circuit boards, Denny, dear." Denise was frowning as she examined the drives on the shelves in front of us.

Denny sighed. "It's hard to get surplus drives with electronics that works, honey."

John raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Electronics that doesn't work, yeah, that's fairly easy to get, but, unless you have manufacturing docs, that's not a good idea."

He chuckled. Denny and I nodded. Denise pursed her lips in an ironic half-smile.

I picked up one of the single-sided, double density drives to look at. "Maybe, depending on a lot of things, a pair of these SS-DD drives for Giselle's Color Computer would be worthwhile. I understand the models Radio Shack is selling for it are SS-DD. But I'd have to replicate their electronics, and their controller, blind. And I don't think I'm ready for that, yet."

I put it back down and picked up one of the double-sided, double-density drives. "But I can only afford one of the DS-DD drives today, if we go that way."

"I'm going to need one of the DS-DD drives," Denny said.

John nodded. "How about one of each, and the SS-DD at half price?"

I calculated the prices. "I have enough money to do that, and it's often useful to have two drives, even if they aren't the same size."

John cocked his head. "If you want to share your electronics when you get it working, I could stock and sell some boards for you."

Denny and I looked at each other and nodded.

"Yeah. We'll think about that," Denny said with a grin.

"These floppy prices are pretty good."  I picked up a box of DS-DD diskettes and a box of SS-DD diskettes. Split half-and-half with you?"

"Let's do that."

"So where is this oscilloscope you want to buy, honey?" Denise asked. "I need to see the price on it or we can't budget it."

Denny and I looked at each other in surprise, and Denise rolled her eyes at us.

"You need it, Honey, so we need to plan for it. Joe, I think you'd better be planning for one, too."

So she got a look at the scopes and wrote down the prices before we left.

*****

Back at their house, we burned the assembler and debug package software into EPROMs, and Denny looked through the TSC catalog I had brought. Denise agreed that it would be right to purchase official copies of what we were using, and Denny took down the order information.

We also burned a copy of the games collection TSC sold.

"Good for testing and demonstrations," I reasoned.

"Yeah. And for looking at the object code and stealing ideas from it."

"Ideas, only."

"Yeah."

Then I helped with some of the honey-does Denny had waiting, helping him finish the sanding and put down the sealer coat on the hand-made bunk beds for their kids. Then we did laundry and took care of lunch while Denise rested. With their third on its way, she was a bit tired after the trip to the surplus store.

While we worked, we talked about what the interface and control circuitry for the floppy drives would need. Denise listened distractedly to our conversation.

When we were done with the non-computer stuff, we sat down again with the computers, and I checked the patches for the assembler and the debugging environment, then we burned both into ROMs and started figuring out how to use them.

Just for fun, we decided to burn the games into a ROM, and we wrote a menu program to select a program from the ROMs, to select and enable among ROMs, and to execute programs in the ROMs we had.

TICTAC FDB $B008 ; START ADDRESS
      FCB $40 ; ROM select/enable bit (set only one bit!)
      FCC "TIC-TAC"
      FCB 0 ; NUL TERM

 "That looks like a good layout for the table of programs."

"Reasonably long label names is sure nice."

"Six characters is a lot better than BASIC's one or two character names."

"Now how do we pass the address of the program name to the routine to show it on the screen?"

"Put it in a global variable called STRADR?"

"Global. We don't need to worry about interrupts, but I sure don't want to remember to check whether there's something else allocated at the address."

"Push it on the stack."

"Where're the PSHX and PULX instructions?"

"This isn't 6801. They don't exist."

"That's awkward."

"We can use immediate mode to load the top half in an accumulator and push it, then repeat for the bottom half."

"That gets it on stack, but then we still need to get it into X in the called code. The only way is to use a global variable."

"How about a software stack pointer in a global variable?"

(The real Denny actually made a comment like this to the real me. The real me blew it off, thinking that the 6801 and the 6809 were just a design away, and then failed to do the design work to get there for either of the more powerful processors.)

"Hmm. And if all the software I write uses that software stack pointer, and saves and restores it on when switching tasks, we're actually golden."

(That was an important realization, okay? Maybe software from other people would make conflicting use of the memory location, but, when I wrote my own software, I could write it to recognize and use it.)

"The CPU registers themselves are just fast globals everyone recognizes as global."

"True."

"So I'm wondering, if we change the dynamic RAM so that we have RAM at $A000, what does that do to our ROMs?"

"I'm wondering the same thing."

"Can we just flatten the RAM and use a 6821 port bit to switch between ROM and RAM?"

"I think I want switch individual 2K banks."

"More port bits, more trace cuts, more exclusive-or gates, more wiring."

"You're right about that, too."

At some point in the evening, we hooked the SS-DD drives up to the power supplies and our computers' parallel ports, carefully using level adjusters, op amps, and other parts from Denny's parts boxes to avoid driving them with too much current, and Denny showed me how we could prove to ourselves that the drive motor, the stepper motor, and the head-load solenoids worked.

Of course, we made sure we had a floppy between the heads for padding before we tried getting them to load.

And of course we took notes of voltages and currents as we worked. The numbers we recorded would help me parameterize the drive's operation, and knowing the operating parameters would help me design the electronics.

Denise watched us work, and celebrated with us when the wormgear to move the heads between tracks moved and when the heads loaded.

"So we can believe these floppy drives will actually work some day!"

"Den, honey, just have a little faith."

"I do."

"Yeah, I guess I know."

I turned my head to let them have a kiss in peace.

*****

At the student ward on Sunday, I re-acquainted myself with some of the members I'd met the previous month, and spent some time finding out a little more about the university. Got home in time for the home ward's young adult home evening.

*****

On Monday, I took the computer and the single-sided drive in to school, and Dr. Brown coached me while I used a scope to repeat what Denny and I had done Saturday evening. With curves and signals, instead of just simple numbers from a meter, I was able to work out programming and hardware for a test rig.

Then I began trying to parameterize the heads themselves, but was not able to get reads and writes.

Dr. Brown suggested some resources to check at the library. So I stopped in the library on the way home and did some research, borrowing issues of some technical magazines and making copies from books the library would not let me check out.

*****

"Wacha readin'?"

I was in the living room, taking advantage of the sofa and the living room floor. "IEEE magazine. An article about group code recording."

"Group what?"

"A way to make sure you can get the data you put on a floppy disk back off."

Dad gave me a blank look. "Now I know one more thing I don't know."

Mom laughed.

Dad grinned. "That pile of magazines more of the same?"

"Yeah."

Dad grew serious. "You're working hard on this."

"It's educational."

"How does this writing on the disk work?"

"Well," I thought for a bit, then pulled out a piece of scratch paper and used the magazine table as a desk, and drew a line:

____

"Is that a one or a zero?"

Dad looked at it sideways. "Trick question, I assume."

"Right. Hard to tell, isn't it?" I added a bit to the left side of the diagram:

¯¯¯¯\____________

"Still looks like a trick question. Or one of those doodles, where the answer is something about mama bowling balls or sinking ships."

Mom chuckled. Giselle slipped quietly into the room and peeked at the paper

I grinned. "You can see a transition from high to low, right?"

Dad sat down beside me. "If I'm looking at it from the same angle as you, yeah, I can see it that way."

"But without the transition, you can't tell whether it's low or high, right?"

"If it were graph paper, ...," Giselle began, but didn't finish.

I nodded. "If it were labeled graphing paper, we wouldn't need the transition. Floppy disks are more like completely blank paper than labeled graphing paper."

"Can't they put rules and labels on them?"

"Engineers tend to do things as cheap as they can. Otherwise, it's hard to make a profit."

"Isn't that like, stupid?"

Dad grimaced, then grinned. "Sometimes, honey, getting things done is more important than doing them pretty or smart."

I nodded.

"Well!" Giselle huffed in exasperation, then came around and sat on the other side of me. "So, okay."

"So, let's see if there's a way to make it easier to read without grid lines."

I added a bit more:

¯¯¯¯\____________/¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯\________/¯¯¯¯

"Could you see that as a 1, a 0, a 1, a 0, and a 1?"

Doubtful nods were what I got in response.

"How about as 1-0-0-0-1-1-1-1-1-0-0-1?"

"The length between?" Giselle asked.

"Very good. The problem is that length is hard to measure on the floppy."

"It's hard to measure on the paper you're writing on, honey." Mom shook her head.

"So we limit the length, and instead of high being 1 and low being 0, a flip is a 1 and no flip is 0." I drew a new line:

¯\_/¯¯¯\___/¯¯¯\_/¯\_/¯\_/¯\_/¯\_/¯\___/¯¯¯\_/¯\

Giselle's face lit up in recognition. "It looks like a sound wave."

"Wave, yes. Electromagnetic waves are important with sensing magnetic fields. Hard to sense without them."

She counted. "1-0-0-0-1-1-1-1-1-0-0-1. It's the same."

"Right. Transitions where there are 1s and no transitions where there are 0s. And there's a transition at the end of each bit, so it's easier to track the length. It's essentially two frequencies, so this is called frequency modulated data recording, or FM. Or maybe it's Manchester encoding. I'm still not quite seeing how they are different."

"Son, I believe you." Dad grinned.

Mom and Giselle laughed.

"Well, this takes more space on the disk than people want it to, so IBM has a modified FM, or MFM, that is more compact. I thought I understood it when I was working with the fast cassette, but what I was doing was not what IBM calls MFM. And the microcomputer industry has several other ways called group coded recording, or GCR, that I'm trying to figure out now. And I'm trying to figure out which I'm going to do with these drives."

Mom smiled and nodded. "Which method does the floppies for Giselle's computer use?"

"Well, according to what I've read, it seems to be one of the more common GCR formats. But I'm not sure about that, either. I find conflicting information."

Dad looked at Mom and she raised her eyebrows and nodded.

"You think you'd have a better time of it if you had a working drive to compare it to?"

I looked at Dad and raised my eyebrows. "Yeah. I could definitely make more progress with more parameters known."

He frowned and tilted his head and nodded to Mom, and he and Mom went to Giselle's room, taking Giselle with them. I heard Giselle complain for a moment, then the three of them left. They returned some time later, when I was in my room doing some calculations on the Micro Chroma 68. Dad called me into Giselle's room, where I showed them how to hook the new floppy disk drive they had bought up to her computer.

They had also bought the disk version of the word processing program, and we experimented with it.

"I think the ROM pack is easier to use," Giselle muttered under her breath.

"Definitely more commands to remember with the floppy drive," I agreed.

Dad and Mom nodded in agreement.

"But you can do a lot more with software loaded from a floppy, and you can make larger files," I added.

Mom frowned. "I wonder if it's worth it."

"Well, let's just try to avoid forcing things. Use what's easiest for now, and I'll help with the disk commands when you need help."

Dad wrinkled his forehead. "Can we save files from the tape to the disk?"

"I think so." I looked in the Disk BASIC manual that came with the disk controller, and tried using some BASIC commands to do that and display the saved file names in the directory, and the commands worked, and Dad and Giselle grinned in relief.

"Can I take the whole rig to the lab sometime this week?" I asked.

"Can I come with, and watch?" Giselle's response surprised us all.

*****

Thursday, I took Giselle with me, and we took both computers to school. She set her computer up in Dad's office and worked while I went to class.

When I finished classes and returned to Dad's office, Julia had come in to do some work for Dad, and Giselle was showing her how to use the computer. Dad wished us "Have a funny time!" as we left his office, and we took both computers to the electronics lab.

Julia dropped by the electronics lab after about an hour to watch.

With the clues I got from using the oscilloscope to watch what the Color Computer disk drive was doing, I was able to align the read/write heads on the drives and get the drives to see the data signal that the Color Computer wrote on the disks. I knew the alignment was not perfect, but it allowed me to proceed.

Next I worked out a way to read and write raw data by bit-banging, using a single bit of a parallel port under direct control of the CPU, writing and reading a track of 2500 bytes at an approximate 100 kilobaud. There were uneven gaps between bytes where the index register was updated to get the next byte from the buffer, but I adjusted the code with NOPs to make the timing for the read and write equal, and it sort-of worked.

That proved the heads worked, so I changed the circuit to use a shift register fed by the whole parallel port, with no stop, start, or parity bits. That allowed me to almost reliably write and read tracks with byte values that had easy bit patterns, at 150 Kilobaud. But it tended to drop bits on sequences of four or more bits the same, as expected.
Just for fun, I inserted Giselle's and Julia's names in the data. The stream always lost sync from the "a" in Julia. That's ASCII code $61 in hexadecimal, or 01100001 in binary, four zeroes in a row.

Then I added a simple circuit between the output bit and the disk head, to FM encode the data on write, and to decode it on read, and I could get whole tracks with no dropped bytes, at 250 kilobaud.

"Cool." Giselle was impressed.

Julia shook her head. "I don't understand anything of what you just did, other than my name messing up your data."

"Only until I got the data properly FM encoded. It's a good test pattern."

"I can't even begin to understand what that means."

"Uhm," I started to get some scratch paper out.

"No, don't bother. I don't think it would help."

"Well, okay."

"I don't get it."

"What?"

"Why don't you just borrow the money and buy an Apple? Wouldn't that be faster and easier?"

"Ah, faster, yes." Dr. Brown nodded.

"But I wouldn't be learning nearly as much."

"And that's the down side of buying someone else's, besides having to pay the loan back." Dr. Brown took my side.

"I see." Julia pursed her lips with a frown.

Giselle refrained from saying anything, although she told me when we got home that now she could definitely understand why I hadn't fallen head over heels for Julia.

I have to admit, I still wasn't sure, myself.

Chapter 11.0: Headwinds -- IBM

TOC

---

[Backed up at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/03/bk-33209-parameters.html.]

Backup: 33209: Parameters

Backup of https://joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/2020/03/33209-parameters.html.

---

[JMR202003051345 -- extensive additions:]

Chapter 9: Interviewing IBM

Chapter 10: Parameters

(As I mentioned already, the real me was not brave enough or something, and never got disk drives for the Micro Chroma 68. Maybe he was a bit lazy in his thinking. But he thought saving up for tuition at a university where he could get a full bachelor's degree was more important than getting and developing his tools. And he had some other faults in his thought processes, but it is not my purpose to make this a confessional. Everybody makes mistakes.)

Friday after classes and newspapers, I loaded my stuff in the Colt again and headed to Austin. Got there late but got a look at Denny's computer. He was just finishing the box when I arrived.

He had used my coming as an excuse, and got the computer put together as far as mine, but his box was much nicer. He had a router, and other woodworking tools which I did not, and he had more experience working with wood than I did.

While we worked on the computers and discussed plans for Saturday, Denise listened, not saying much. When we talked about ways to tune the cassette interfaces without an oscilloscope, I saw her grimace.

*****

In the morning, Denise went with us to the surplus store. "Got to make sure my husband doesn't spend too much money," she commented with a wry, knowing smile as we left the house.

The two of them exchanged glances, and Denise wrinkled her nose at Denny.

He chuckled resignedly. "I know what our budget is, honey. I can keep things within the budget."

I kept out of it.

At the surplus store, the first thing we picked out was EPROM erasers. Then we checked our budgets and looked at floppy disk drives.

"Those eight inchers are a real steal," John said as we passed them by. Denny and I exchanged glances.

I shook my head. "Well, if I wanted compatibility with the school's 8080 trainer system floppies, I guess they would be. Or if I wanted compatibility with IBM's old minicomputers and mainframes. At least, I guess they aren't IBM's recent high density format."

"No, only capable of a quarter of a megabyte. But I'll give you two for the price of one."

That was tempting.

(These days, such drives go at really good prices among the retro community. Of course, inflation means that that it would not have been a good financial investment, even of the small sort. If you worry about the monetary value of such things.)

Denny shook his head. "Maybe later, but I don't think I have space for two drives that big."

"Ah, well," John grinned. "I guess I'll just have to show you the five and a quarter inchers I got in last week. A little more expensive, but they have opposing heads for double-sided disks, and the heads are double-density capable. If you don't want those, I have single-sided, double-density five and a quarter inchers for cheap, too."

"None of these have circuit boards, Denny, dear." Denise was frowning as she examined the drives on the shelves in front of us.

Denny sighed. "It's hard to get surplus drives with electronics that works, honey."

John raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Electronics that doesn't work, yeah, that's fairly easy to get, but, unless you have manufacturing docs, that's not a good idea."

He chuckled. Denny and I nodded. Denise pursed her lips in an ironic half-smile.

I picked up one of the single-sided, double density drives to look at. "Maybe, depending on a lot of things, a pair of these SS-DD drives for Giselle's Color Computer would be worthwhile. I understand the models Radio Shack is selling for it are SS-DD. But I'd have to replicate their electronics, and their controller, blind. And I don't think I'm ready for that, yet."

I put it back down and picked up one of the double-sided, double-density drives. "But I can only afford one of the DS-DD drives today, if we go that way."

"I'm going to need one of the DS-DD drives," Denny said.

John nodded. "How about one of each, and the SS-DD at half price?"

I calculated the prices. "I have enough money to do that, and it's often useful to have two drives, even if they aren't the same size."

John cocked his head. "If you want to share your electronics when you get it working, I could stock and sell some boards for you."

Denny and I looked at each other and nodded.

"Yeah. We'll think about that," Denny said with a grin.

"These floppy prices are pretty good."  I picked up a box of DS-DD diskettes and a box of SS-DD diskettes. Split half-and-half with you?"

"Let's do that."

"So where is this oscilloscope you want to buy, honey?" Denise asked. "I need to see the price on it or we can't budget it."

Denny and I looked at each other in surprise, and Denise rolled her eyes at us.

"You need it, Honey, so we need to plan for it. Joe, I think you'd better be planning for one, too."

So she got a look at the scopes and wrote down the prices before we left.

*****

Back at their house, we burned the assembler and debug package software into EPROMs, and Denny looked through the TSC catalog I had brought. Denise agreed that it would be right to purchase official copies of what we were using, and Denny took down the order information.

We also burned a copy of the games collection TSC sold.

"Good for testing and demonstrations," I reasoned.

"Yeah. And for looking at the object code and stealing ideas from it."

"Ideas, only."

"Yeah."

Then I helped with some of the honey-does Denny had waiting, helping him finish the sanding and put down the sealer coat on the hand-made bunk beds for their kids, and do laundry and take care of lunch while Denise rested. Their third was on its way, and she was a bit tired after the trip to the surplus store.

While we worked, we talked about what the interface and control circuitry for the floppy drives would need. Denise listened abstractedly to our conversation.

After the sanding was finished and the sealer coat applied, we sat down with the computers, and I checked the patches for the assembler and the debugging environment, then we burned both into ROMs and started figuring out how to use them.

Just for fun, we decided to burn the games into a ROM, and wrote a menu program to select a program from the ROMs, select and enable the ROM, and execute the program.

TICTAC FDB $B008 ; START ADDRESS
      FCB $40 ; ROM select/enable bit (set only one bit!)
      FCC "TIC-TAC"
      FCB 0 ; NUL TERM

 "That looks like a good layout for the table of programs."

"Reasonably long label names is sure nice."

"Six characters is a lot better than BASIC's one or two character names."

"Now how do we pass the address of the program name to the routine to show it on the screen?"

"Put it in a global variable called STRADR?"

"Global. We don't need to worry about interrupts, but I sure don't want to remember to check whether there's something else allocated at the address."

"Push it on the stack."

"Where're the PSHX and PULX instructions?"

"This isn't 6801. They don't exist."

"That's awkward."

"We can load the top half in an accumulator and push it, then repeat for the bottom half."

"That gets it on stack, but then we still need to get it into X in the called code. The only way is to use a global variable."

"How about a software stack pointer in a global variable?"

(The real Denny actually made a comment like this to the real me. The real me blew it off, thinking that the 6801 and the 6809 were just a design away, and then failed to do the design work to get there for either of the more powerful processors.)

"Hmm. And if all the software I write uses that software stock pointer, and saves and restores it on when switching tasks, we're actually golden."

(That was an important realization, okay? Maybe software from other people would make conflicting use of the memory location, but I could write my software to recognize and use it.)

"The CPU registers themselves are just fast globals everyone recognizes as global."

"True."

At some point in the evening, we hooked the SS-DD drives up to the power supplies and our computers' parallel ports, carefully using level adjusters, op amps, and other parts from Denny's parts boxes to avoid driving them with too much current, and Denny showed me how we could prove to ourselves that the drive motor, the stepper motor, and the head-load solenoids worked.

Of course, we made sure we had a floppy between the heads for padding before we tried getting them to load.

And of course we took notes of voltages and currents as we worked. The numbers we recorded would help me parameterize the drive's operation, and knowing the operating parameters would help me design the electronics.

Denise watched us work, and celebrated with us when the wormgear moved and when the heads loaded.

"So we can believe these floppy drives will actually work some day!"

"Den, honey, just have a little faith."

"I do."

"Yeah, I guess I know."

I turned my head to let them have a kiss in peace.

*****

At the student ward on Sunday, I re-acquainted myself with some of the members I'd met the previous month, and spent some time finding out a little more about the university. Got home in time for the home ward's young adult home evening.

*****

On Monday, I took the computer and the single-sided drive in to school, and Dr. Brown coached me while I used a scope to repeat what Denny and I had done Saturday evening. With curves and signals, instead of just simple numbers, I was able to work out programming for a test rig.

Then I began trying to parameterize the heads themselves, but was not able to get reads and writes.

Dr. Brown suggested some resources to check at the library. So I stopped in the library on the way home and did some research, borrowing issues of some technical magazines and making copies from books the library would not let me check out.

*****

"Wacha readin'?"

I was in the living room, taking advantage of the sofa. "IEEE magazine. An article about group code recording."

"Group what?"

"A way to make sure you can get the data you put on a floppy disk back off."

Dad gave me a blank look. "Now I know one more thing I don't know."

Mom laughed.

Dad grinned. "That pile of magazines more of the same?"

"Yeah."

Dad grew serious. "You're working hard on this."

"It's educational."

"How does this all come together?"

"Well," I thought for a bit, then pulled out a piece of scratch paper and used the coffee table as a desk, and drew a line:

____

"Is that a one or a zero?"

Dad looked at it sideways. "Trick question, I assume."

"Right. Hard to tell, isn't it?" I added a bit to the left side of the diagram:

¯¯¯¯\____________

"Still looks like a trick question. Or one of those doodles, where the answer is something about mama bowling balls."

Mom chuckled. Giselle slipped quietly into the room and peeked at the paper

I grinned. "You can see a transition from high to low, right?"

Dad sat down beside me. "If I'm looking at it from the same angle as you, yeah, I can see it that way."

"But without the transition, you can't tell whether it's low or high, right?"

"If it were graph paper, ...," Giselle began.

I nodded. "If it were labeled graphing paper, we wouldn't need the transition. Floppy disks are more like completely blank paper than labeled graphing paper."

"Can't they put rules and labels on them?"

"Engineers tend to do things as cheap as they can. Otherwise, it's hard to make a profit."

"Isn't that like, stupid?"

Dad grimaced, then grinned. "Sometimes, honey, getting things done is more important than doing them pretty or smart."

I nodded.

"Well!" Giselle huffed in exasperation, then came around and sat on the other side of me. "So, okay."

"What Dad said." I added a bit more:

¯¯¯¯\____________/¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯\________/¯¯¯¯

"Could you see that as a 1, a 0, a 1, a 0, and a 1?"

Doubtful nods were what I got in response.

"How about as 1-0-0-0-1-1-1-1-1-0-0-1?"

"The length between?" Giselle asked.

"Very good. The problem is that length is hard to measure on the floppy."

"It's hard to measure on the paper you're writing on, honey." Mom shook her head.

"So we limit the length, and instead of high being 1 and low being 0, a flip is a 1 and no flip is 0." I drew a new line:

¯\_/¯¯¯\___/¯¯¯\_/¯\_/¯\_/¯\_/¯\_/¯\___/¯¯¯\_/¯\

Giselle's face lit up in recognition. "It looks like a sound wave." She counted. "1-0-0-0-1-1-1-1-1-0-0-1. It's the same."

"Right. Transitions where there are 1s and no transitions where there are 0s. And there's a transition at the end of each bit, so it's easier to track the length. It's essentially two frequencies, so this is called frequency modulated data recording, or FM."

"Son, I believe you." Dad grinned.

Mom laughed.

"Well, this takes more space than people want it to, so IBM has a modified FM, or MFM, that is more compact. I thought I understood it when I was working with the fast cassette, but what I was doing was not what IBM calls MFM. And the microcomputer industry has several other ways called group coded recording, or GCR, that I'm trying to figure out now. And I'm trying to decide between them."

Mom smiled and nodded. "Which method does the floppies for Giselle's computer use?"

"According to what I've read, it seems to be one of the more common GCR formats."

Dad looked at Mom and she raised her eyebrows and nodded.

"You think you'd have a better time of it if you had a working drive to compare it to?"

I looked at Dad. "Yeah. I could definitely make more progress with more parameters known."

He frowned and tilted his head, and he and Mom went to Giselle's room, taking Giselle with them. I heard Giselle complain for a moment, then the three of them left. They returned some time later, when I was in my room doing some calculations on the Micro Chroma 68. Dad called me into Giselle's room, where I showed them how to hook the new floppy disk drive they had bought up to her computer.

They had also bought the disk version of the word processing program, and experiment with it.

"I think the ROM pack is easier to use," Giselle muttered under her breath.

"Definitely more commands to remember," I agreed.

Dad and Mom nodded in agreement.

"But you can get a lot more capabilities with software loaded from a floppy," I added.

Mom frowned. "I wonder if it's worth it."

"Well, let's just try to avoid forcing things. Use what's easiest for now, and I'll help with the disk commands when you need help."

Dad wrinkled his forehead. "Can we save files from the tape to the disk?"

"I think so." I tried some BASIC commands, and they worked, and Dad and Giselle grinned in relief.

"Can I take the whole rig to the lab sometime this week?"

"Can I come with, and watch?" Giselle's response surprised us all.

*****

Thursday, I took Giselle with me, and we took both computers to school. She set her computer up in Dad's office and worked while I went to class. Julia was there, and Giselle was showing her how to use it, when I finished classes. Dad wished us "Have a funny time!" as we left his office, and we took both computers to the electronics lab.

Julia dropped by after about an hour to watch.

With the clues I got from using the oscilloscope to watch what the Color Computer disk drive was doing, I was able to get my drives to read and write raw data under direct control of the CPU and the serial port that afternoon.

"Cool." Giselle was impressed.

Julia shook her head. "I don't understand anything of what you just did."

"Uhm," I started to get some scratch paper out.

"No, don't bother. I don't think it would help."

"Well, okay."

"I don't get it."

"What?"

"Why don't you just borrow the money and buy an Apple? Wouldn't that be faster?"

"Ah, faster, yes." Dr. Brown nodded.

"But I wouldn't be learning nearly as much."

"And that's the down side of it, besides having to pay the loan back." Dr. Brown took my side.

"I see." Julia pursed her lips.

Giselle refrained from saying anything, although she told me later that now she could definitely understand why I hadn't fallen head over heels for Julia.

Chapter 11:

TOC

---

[Backed up at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/03/bk-33209-parameters.html.]

[JMR202003051345 -- extensive additions]

Chapter 9: Interviewing IBM

Chapter 10: Parameters

(As I mentioned already, the real me was not brave enough or something, and never got disk drives for the Micro Chroma 68. Maybe he was a bit lazy in his thinking. But he thought saving up for tuition at a university where he could get a full bachelor's degree was more important than getting and developing his tools. And he had some other faults in his thought processes, but it is not my purpose to make this a confessional. Everybody makes mistakes.)

Friday after classes and newspapers, I loaded my stuff in the Colt again and headed to Austin. Got there late but got a look at Denny's computer. He was just finishing the box when I arrived.

He had used my coming as an excuse, and got the computer put together as far as mine, but his box was much nicer. He had a router, and other woodworking tools which I did not, and he had more experience working with wood than I did.

While we worked on the computers and discussed plans for Saturday, Denise listened, not saying much. When we talked about ways to tune the cassette interfaces without an oscilloscope, I saw her grimace.

*****

In the morning, Denise went with us to the surplus store. "Got to make sure my husband doesn't spend too much money," she commented with a wry, knowing smile as we left the house.

The two of them exchanged glances, and Denise wrinkled her nose at Denny.

He chuckled resignedly. "I know what our budget is, honey. I can keep things within the budget."

I kept out of it.

At the surplus store, the first thing we picked out was EPROM erasers. Then we checked our budgets and looked at floppy disk drives.

"Those eight inchers are a real steal," John said as we passed them by. Denny and I exchanged glances.

I shook my head. "Well, if I wanted compatibility with the school's 8080 trainer system floppies, I guess they would be. Or if I wanted compatibility with IBM's old minicomputers and mainframes. At least, I guess they aren't IBM's recent high density format."

"No, only capable of a quarter of a megabyte. But I'll give you two for the price of one."

That was tempting.

Denny shook his head. "Maybe later, but I don't think I have space for two drives that big."

"Ah, well," John grinned. "I guess I'll just have to show you the five and a quarter inchers I got in last week. A little more expensive, but they have opposing heads for double-sided disks, and the heads are double-density capable. If you don't want those, I have single-sided, double-density five and a quarter inchers for cheap, too."

"None of these have circuit boards, Denny, dear." Denise was frowning as she examined the drives on the shelves in front of us.

Denny sighed. "It's hard to get surplus drives with electronics that works, honey."

John raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Electronics that doesn't work, yeah, that's fairly easy to get, but, unless you have manufacturing docs, that's not a good idea."

I picked up one of the single-sided, double density drives to look at. "Maybe, depending on a lot of things, a pair of these SS-DD drives for Giselle's Color Computer would be worthwhile. I understand SS-DD is what Radio Shack sells for it. But I'd have to replicate the electronics, and the controller, and I'm not quite ready for that, yet."

I put it back down and picked up one of the double-sided, double-density drives. "But I can only afford one of the DS-DD drives today, if we go that way."

"I'm going to need one of the DS-DD drives," Denny said.

John nodded. "How about one of each, and the SS-DD at half price?"

I calculated the prices. "I have enough money to do that, and it's often useful to have two drives, even if they aren't the same size."

John cocked his head. "If you want to share your electronics when you get it working, I could stock and sell some boards for you."

Denny and I looked at each other and nodded.

"Yeah. We'll think about that," Denny said with a grin.

"These floppy prices are pretty good."  I picked up a box of DS-DD diskettes and a box of SS-DD diskettes. Split half-and-half with you?"

"Let's do that."

"So where is this oscilloscope you want to buy, honey?" Denise asked. "I need to see the price on it or we can't budget it."

Denny and I looked at each other in surprise, and Denise rolled her eyes at us.

"You need it, Honey, so we need to plan for it. Joe, I think you'd better be planning for one, too."

So she got a look at the scopes and wrote down the prices before we left.

*****

Back at their house, we burned the assembler and debug package software into EPROMs, and Denny looked through the TSC catalog I had brought. Denise agreed that it would be right to purchase official copies of what we were using, and Denny took down the order information.

We also burned a copy of the games collection TSC sold.

"Good for testing and demonstrations," I reasoned.

"Yeah. And for looking at the object code and stealing ideas from it."

"Ideas, only."

"Yeah."

Then I helped with some of the honey-does Denny had waiting, helping him finish the sanding and put down the sealer coat on the hand-made bunk beds for their kids, and do laundry and take care of lunch while Denise rested. Their third was on its way, and she was a bit tired after the trip to the surplus store.

While we worked, we talked about what the interface and control circuitry for the floppy drives would need. Denise listened abstractedly to our conversation.

After the sanding was finished and the sealer coat applied, we sat down with the computers, and I checked the patches for the assembler and the debugging environment, then we burned both into ROMs and started figuring out how to use them.

Just for fun, we decided to burn the games into a ROM, and wrote a menu program to select a program from the ROMs, select and enable the ROM, and execute the program.

TICTAC FDB $B008 ; START ADDRESS
      FCB $40 ; ROM select/enable bit (set only one bit!)
      FCC "TIC-TAC"
      FCB 0 ; NUL TERM

 "That looks like a good layout for the table of programs."

"Reasonably long label names is sure nice."

"Six characters is a lot better than BASIC's one or two character names."

"Now how do we pass the address of the program name to the routine to show it on the screen?"

"Put it in a global variable called STRADR?"

"Global. We don't need to worry about interrupts, but I sure don't want to remember to check whether there's something else allocated at the address."

"Push it on the stack."

"Where're the PSHX and PULX instructions?"

"This isn't 6801. They don't exist."

"That's awkward."

"We can load the top half in an accumulator and push it, then repeat for the bottom half."

"That gets it on stack, but then we still need to get it into X in the called code. The only way is to use a global variable."

"How about a software stack pointer in a global variable?"

[JMR202003030020 -- original:]

The real Denny actually made a comment like this to the real me. I blew it off, thinking that the 6801 and the 6809 were just a design away, and then not doing the design.

"Hmm. And if all the software I write uses that software stock pointer, and saves and restores it on when switching tasks, we're actually golden."

"The registers themselves are just fast globals everyone recognizes as global."

"True."

At some point in the evening, we hooked the SS-DD drives up to the power supplies and our computers' parallel ports, carefully using level adjusters, op amps, and other parts from Denny's parts boxes to avoid driving them with too much current, and proved to ourselves that the drive motor, the stepper motor, and the head-load solenoids worked, making sure we had a floppy between the heads for padding before we loaded them.

Denise watched us work, and celebrated with us when the wormgear moved and when the heads loaded.

"So we can believe these floppy drives will actually work some day!"

"Den, honey, just have a little faith."

"I do."

"Yeah, I guess I know."

I turned my face to let them have a kiss in peace.

*****

At the student ward on Sunday, I re-acquainted myself with some of the members I'd met the previous month, and spent some time finding out a little more about the university. Got home in time for the home ward's young adult home evening.

[JMR202003030020 -- edits and additions:]


(The real Denny actually made a comment like this to the real me. The real me blew it off, thinking that the 6801 and the 6809 were just a design away, and then failing to do the design work to get there for either of those processors.)

"Hmm. And if all the software I write uses that software stock pointer, and saves and restores it on when switching tasks, we're actually golden."

"The CPU registers themselves are just fast globals everyone recognizes as global."

"True."

At some point in the evening, we hooked the SS-DD drives up to the power supplies and our computers' parallel ports, carefully using level adjusters, op amps, and other parts from Denny's parts boxes to avoid driving them with too much current, and Denny showed me how we could prove to ourselves that the drive motor, the stepper motor, and the head-load solenoids worked.

Of course, we made sure we had a floppy between the heads for padding before we tried getting them to load.

And of course we took notes of voltages and currents as we worked. The numbers we recorded would help me parameterize the drive's operation, and knowing the operating parameters would help me design the electronics.

Denise watched us work, and celebrated with us when the wormgear moved and when the heads loaded.

"So we can believe these floppy drives will actually work some day!"

"Den, honey, just have a little faith."

"I do."

"Yeah, I guess I know."

I turned my head to let them have a kiss in peace.

*****

At the student ward on Sunday, I re-acquainted myself with some of the members I'd met the previous month, and spent some time finding out a little more about the university. Got home in time for the home ward's young adult home evening.

*****

On Monday, I took the computer and the single-sided drive in to school, and Dr. Brown coached me while I used a scope to repeat what Denny and I had done Saturday evening. With curves, instead of just simple numbers, I was able to work out programming for a test rig.

Then I began trying to parameterize the heads themselves, but was not able to get reads and writes.

Dr. Brown suggested some resources to check at the library. So I stopped in the library on the way home and did some research, borrowing issues of some technical magazines and making copies from books the library would not let me check out.

*****

"Whacha readin'?"

"IEEE magazine. An article about group code recording."

"What's that?"

"A way to make sure you can get the data you put on a floppy disk back off."

Dad gave me a blank look. "Know I know one more thing I don't know."

Mom laughed.

Dad grinned. "That pile of magazines more of the same?"

"Yeah."

Dad grew serious. "You think you'd have a better time of it if you had a working drive to compare it to?"

I looked up at him. "Yeah. I could definitely make more progress with some more known parameters."

He nodded and left my room, taking Mom with him, and stopping in Giselle's room. I heard Giselle complain for a moment, then the three of them left. They returned some time later, and Dad called me into Giselle's room, where I showed them how to hook the new floppy disk drive up to her computer.

"I think the ROM pack is easier to use," Giselle muttered under her breath.

"Definitely more commands to remember," I agreed.

Dad and Mom nodded.

"But you get a lot more capabilities with loading software from a floppy."

Mom frowned. "I wonder if it's worth it."

"Well, let's just try to avoid forcing things. Can I take the whole rig to the lab sometime this week?"

"Can I come with and watch?" Giselle's response surprised us all.

*****

With clues from the Color Computer disk drive, and with Giselle and Dad cheering me on, I was able to get my drives to read and write raw data under direct control of the CPU by Thursday afternoon.

[JMR202003030020 -- end.]

Chapter 11:

TOC

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[Backed up at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/03/bk-33209-parameters.html.]

Backup: 33209: Interviewing IBM

Backup of https://joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/2020/02/33209-interviewing-ibm.html.

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Chapter 8: Bootstrapping, or Baby Steps

Chapter 9: Interviewing IBM

I took the computer to school with my stereo cassette deck on Wednesday, borrowed a scope again, and tuned the fast cassette interface circuit. That went quickly, and I got good write (record) and read (playback) results at 1500 baud on the stereo deck.

Then I decided to experiment, and I got my lab kits out and used the parts and breadboard to put together an MFM state machine for read and write, and started experimenting with recording raw bits on tape in MFM. I was able to get consistent reads from writes on text data up to over four kilobaud on the portable cassette recorder, and up to almost nine kilobaud on the stereo cassette deck.

(As with tuning the slow cassete interface, I never really bothered to do this. MFM? The fast cassette interface I put together may have used MFM recording. I apparently didn't pay enough attention, and the actual devices are not where I can dig them out to check. Anyway, the me in this story needs to experiment with MFM at this point. I'm pretty sure MFM could have achieved four kilobaud on a reasonably good cassette recorder and eight kilobaud on a moderately high-fidelity cassette deck, with reasonably good tapes and a reasonably fast MFM state machine.)

Dr. Brown observed my work and decided it would be a good lab for the digital circuits class, and asked me to leave my breadboarded interface intact for him to work up the lab from. I complied, taking a copy of the circuit diagram with me, to add to the Micro Chroma 68 as an interface, later.

When I got home, my mother gave me a message from Ms. Bight's secretary. Ms. Bight had heard from Freddy Burns about my building the computer, and wondered if I could bring it to the interview with me. I called before I started folding newspapers and confirmed that I would.

After delivering the newspapers and checking homework, I reviewed and revised my résumé and proposal, then spent more time using the monitor's disassembler to explore the monitor ROM's object code.

*****

Mom had offered to take the route on Thursday so I wouldn't be under too much time pressure to make it to the IBM office in Midland for the interview, but the newspapers came on time. After I got them out, I took a quick shower, changed into a suit, packed the computer, display, and stereo cassette deck in the Colt, and drove to the interview. I arrived a little before the interview was scheduled, at ten to six, but was shown in when I arrived.

(Okay, I said that the institutions were pretty much as they were, as they affected me. They indeed have been, to this point. But if my actions in this fictional version of the world had no affect on them, this story would have no point in being written.)

"Hi. Come on in and have a chair. Should I call you Marion or Joseph?"

"Hello, Ms. Bight. Most people call me Joe."

"You can call me Meg. Megabyte if you wish," she laughed. "I've been telling people for years that we need to be talking about megabytes of memory."

I chuckled at her joke. "It's a forward-looking name."

"We really haven't done student internships at this office before. We don't have an established set of procedures, so you are pioneering."

"I enjoy pioneering."

"That's good to hear. Did you bring your proposal?"

"Sure. I have it here, with my résumé."

I handed her the folder I was carrying, and she scanned it over quickly.

"Résumé looks good. Maybe a tad too much detail."

I've always had problems putting too much detail in my résumés.

"And your proposal looks good, too. Do I get to see your computer?"

"It's in the car. Figured I'd tell your secretary I was here first, before I brought it in."

"I could read this while you go get it."

"Sure."

It took three trips to bring in the whole setup.

She raised her eyebrows as she examined the circuit boards. "Clean work, but very much not ready for marketing."

"It's not really intended for the market. Old 8-bit CPU. Just using it in my classes. Later it'll be my ROM burner when I start playing with other processors."

"Old processor?"

"The eight-bit sixty-eight hundred. Well, actually, sixty-eight oh-two, but still labeled by Motorola as not intended for new stuff."

"Oh." She sounded disappointed. "Not the sixty-eight thousand."

"The 68000 is a much bigger package -- sixty-four pins. Motorola doesn't seem to be into multiplexing address and data, except for their SOCs."

"Never seen one up close. Come to think of it, when Freddy mentioned it, I think he did say it was the 8-bit 6800, and I only heard the sixty-eight. So what can you do with a 6800?"

"Wrote the résumé and the proposal both on this, using a text editor and a text processor."

"Text editor plus text processor. Screen doesn't look like what is printed, then?"

"True. No preview mode on this. But this is running Tiny BASIC from ROM, so I can use it as a nice programmable calculator. My electronics prof sometimes has me demonstrating what we're working on in the AC and digital logic classes on days when I borrow a 'scope at school. And of course I plan on using this for the microprocessors class."

"Then I guess it works pretty well for you. Have you had any problems while building it?"

"Not really. According to my electronics teacher, not nearly enough."

She laughed and I shrugged.

Then she gave me a sharp look. "You're not joking."

"He says people learn more from mistakes. I think he has a point."

"But you seem to already understand quite a lot of this. Do you need to even take the microprocessors class?"

"There are some topics I need to cover still. And, of course, I gotta give them a good reason to give me the piece of paper that says I graduated."

"Are you sure? Two Steves come to mind."

"True, Jobs and Wozniak never graduated, but they had a lot more experience than I do when they started making computers."

"Several of my employees don't have degrees."

"Neither does my brother. He says he's the only non-degreed engineer in his division at Motorola. But they keep nagging him about it, and he goes back to school only to have them drop emergency projects in his lap before courses are complete."

"Good point. I've done the same thing to my employees."

I refrained from mentioning that my dad and I had an agreement about my working on a degree and staying rent-free at home. (In the real world, I remembering mentioning the agreement to the boss at IBM, which was probably not strategic.)

"So show me what you can do with this."

I showed her the loan amortization program and the Newton-Raphson program, loading them from the fast cassette and letting her examine my source code.

"Very readable source code, even with the gotos."

"Thanks. Readability is something I work at, even for small programs like these."

"You're using your stereo cassette deck."

"I have an interface that runs faster than 300 baud in here, and it works with a mid-to-hi-fi deck."

"Did you invent it?"

"No, it was a circuit one of my brother's friends put together. Yesterday I played around with MFM recording techniques, though. It looks like I could add an MFM circuit that runs at between four and eight kilobaud, which would give more than a half a megabyte of storage per side on a 30 minute tape."

"Stereo. Using both channels?"

"Ran into crosstalk problems yesterday. It'd need a bit more careful design in the write and read circuits. Just using one channel now."

"Do you plan to put an operating system on it?"

"Yeah, once I get floppy drives working on it, I plan to put an OS called Flex on it."

"Floppy drives?"

"Going to Austin to look for possibilities in a surplus electronics store down there."

She raised her eyebrows. "Surplus likely means a raw drive."

"Yeah. Save a bit of money and have the fun of designing the electronics for it. Maybe."

She shook her head. "Well, promise not to make that kind of decision with company time, okay?"

I chuckled and nodded. "Yeah. Different priorities there."

"Programming languages?"

"Flex has Pascal and ForTran available."

"That's good to hear. You mentioned other processors. Intel?"

"Maybe. But I don't really have much access to them. 8080 at school. I get a lot of free parts from my brother, with company permission."

Her expression sharpened.

"It's an engineering incentive program. They're allowed to pull parts from the reject bin and test them, and use any that are good enough for what they want to do."

"Ah." She nodded doubtfully.

"So I'm doing a lot of the grunt work for him."

She gave a quiet snort. "Just don't do that without permission here."

"Of course. Never without permission."

"So this computer does what you need. I guess you don't need to build one with a 68000?"

"Well," I chuckled. "I want to be able to work with Japanese. Less than 256 characters works okay on an 8-bit computer, but, for thousands of characters, you need more address space than a typical 8-bit has."

"Oh, that's right." She glanced down at my résumé. "You just got back from two years over there, like, a few months ago?"

"Yeah."

"And you speak Japanese?"

"Nan-to-ka."

She chuckled. "And what does that mean?"

"It means 'Sort-of'. Some people said I was speaking pretty well. But I still make a lot of mistakes."

"Oh. So what did you do as a missionary?"

"Found a few people who were interested in learning about what we believe. Taught free English classes. Looked for opportunities to be of service to people."

"I've heard that your missionary program is like a sales training program."

"Some people treat it that way, but my mission presidents did not. They asked us to deepen our understanding of our religion instead of focusing on sales techniques."

"Interesting. So how would you summarize your religion?

"Depends. What do you think about religion?"

"I'm agnostic, or maybe atheistic. Grew up Methodist, but I really have a hard time believing in the God people preach."

"Well, one thing I believe is that, even though there are dangers, the universe is not out to get me."

"Heh. Not out to get me. That's nice to now."

"Most people don't really quite grasp what I mean when I say God wants us to be happy, so I try different points of view on it, and this is one."

"I guess I could see that. Is that all?"

"Well, if you can believe that paranoia is not a universal truth, then it does make it easier to believe that it's worth trying to be a better person. And that kind of ties into what the electronics professor says about mistakes. We do learn more when things go wrong, and learning makes us happier than having nothing go wrong."

"Nicely put." She laughed "Backhanded persuasion. I'll have to be careful around you if I don't want to lose my agnostic attitude." She nodded with a bemused grin. "So, I can take what you said in your proposal seriously, that you would like to learn what it's like to work at an IBM sales office?"

"Yeah."

"Can I mention your computer building ambitions in my analysis, since you didn't really mention them in either?"

"Sure."

"What are your plans?"

"Well, I'm thinking first I'll rework this design to include the 6801 instead of the 6802."

"Not familiar with the part numbers, but that sounds like a step backwards."

"It's actually a step forward. Small, but important compatible improvements to the instruction set, SOC-style built-in RAM and I/O. I'm thinking to build a trainer with maybe three chips, with a header than allows attaching a 6847 video controller like this, more RAM, I/O, etc."

"Making this computer obsolete immediately?"

"I think I'll keep this one for ROM burning, if for nothing else."

"How about the 68000?"

"After I get comfortable with the 6809."

"6809? It's better than the 6801 or something?"

"More like a crossover 16-bit CPU. Lots of index registers, compared to the 6800."

"Index registers are useful."

"Yep. I want to build a 6845-based video controller for the 6809 first, so I can output more resolution than what a TV is capable of. Then I'll know what I'm doing when I build something similar for the 68000."

"Good plan, but it will take a while. How do you plan on bringing all the hardware up?"

"I've recently heard about a language called Forth that's good for bringing hardware up. I'm planning on putting that on this computer after I get the floppies running, along with the Flex software."

She nodded thoughtfully. "Sounds like you have a plan."

"Then I want to try writing my own OS and programming language. And I want to compare code for the 6800, the 6809, and the 68000."

"Now that's getting pretty ambitious."

"Yeah, I'll have to adjust my plans as I go, since I'm planning on finishing school, as well, and holding down a job in the industry while I'm at it."

"Okay, I'll submit the proposal and see what my superiors say."
"Thank you."

 "Thanks for coming in. I'll let you know the results."

"I appreciate the opportunity, and I look forward to it."

"Give my secretary a call every now and then to keep me informed when things move forward with your computers."

"I'd love to."

Chapter 10: Headwinds

TOC

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[Backed up at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/02/bk-33209-interviewing-ibm.html.]