13 Oct
2022
13 Oct
'22
8:08 a.m.
On 12.10.22 22:54, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote:
Does anyone know how the 1970/1971 original Datapoint
2200 was programmed?
It had tapes containing terminal programs to access different types of
systems. And the instruction set was said to be similar what became the
8008. But how were these terminal programs created and how were the tapes
written? Were they under emulators on larger systems, like a PDP-10?
Were there any tapes that had something like a machine code editor and
tape-write routines? I assume no kind of ROM was built into the system
(unless it had a built in machine code editor, and routines to write that
content to a tape?) Was a version of BASIC ever built for the 8008 that
ran on a Datapoint 2200 or similar system?
-Steve
Look here to wat was available for this class of machines :
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/datapoint/software/60000_Datapoint_Software_Ca…
So, yes, Basic, RPG, Cobol ( for 5500 upwards), Databus, Datashare, Dataform were
available.
Programs development could be done standalone, even on a cassette-only system.
Keep in mind that Diablo 14" diskdrives were available for these system, allowing for
quite a comfortable environment. For early 70's standards of course...
My DP2200 does have a bootrom, allowing for booting from floppy, or some simnple ad-hoc
systems debugging. Look for the deocumented source code for this bootrom on Bitsavers.
Jos